IoT Ecosystem
The goal of this project is to bring many of the strands together, in a grounded real-world problem space and which fully explores the potential and nature of connectedness. That's why we are trying to answer: how several different devices can work together to solve a shared problem?
My Role Status Project Type
Designer/ Programmer Completed Guided Project
Design journey
/ 0 . Problem Space: Connected Cuisine
New technologies have radically influenced not only what we eat but how we eat.
Food is one of the fundamental ingredients of life. We cannot go a day without it before experiencing discomfort and the kinds of food we eat and how we eat them are closely intertwined with our cultural practices, physical environments and personal health. While digital media has transformed every facet of society, the fundamental technologies we encounter in the kitchen today provide only incremental improvements to the tools we have been using for hundreds of years. (From Cornucopia site, Fluid Interfaces Lab, MIT)
Though kitchen gadgets remain a huge market, there is loitt;le doubt that we have been cooking progressively less. Beyond home, a wave of smart products is enhancing better dinning experiences. In restaurants, products like Sprouts are being used by chefs like Barbara Lynch to grow produce at their restaurant. By controlling the growth, they can control the flavor palette of the produce to fit with the dish and enhance the experience for diner. This also increases the transparency and sourcing around production - a growing concern for many diners. But restaurants, particularly fine dining have continually experimented with new technologies as a mechanism to prepare extraordinary meals.
Drawing on our own experiences and interests, we started to ask ourselves: can we imagine the future of the food in restaurant as a connected experience?
/ 1 . Familiarize
Dim Sum Restaurant
Like all of those who were trying to seek an innovative opportunity, we sat in front of a giant white board and tossed around ideas. Exasperated after many discussion, someone blurted, “I love dim sum! Let’s do it for Chinese Dim Sum Restaurant.”
The most painful thing about finding the break point for this project is that: we are all foodies. When speaking about food, the ideas just explode! but with organized manner, we did research, categorized all the types of restaurants and did field trips and interviews with each type of them. Based on amount of communications and interactions customers expected and experienced, we decided to go with the traditional Chinese Dim Sum Restaurant. Here is a simple illustration of the ideation process:
/ 2 . Defamiliarize
Taking a deep dive into understanding the Dim Sum culture, we noticed two important features:
• Unique Connection
The waitresses constantly move around with carts containing Dim Sum baskets. Customers will always stay seated and the carts will stopped by the customers by hand-wave gesture.
• Unique Experience
Customers would sit there for 2-3 hours, or even throughout the day to have a good time with their families and friends. Dim Sum in one basket is normally shared by a number of people.Different groups of people may share one round table.
• Unique culture
The kitchen of Dim Sum restaurant is always busy and stressful. Dim sum chefs would always be busying working till the end of their shift. And unlike many other Chinese dinning experiences, they do not have any communications with the customers.
Based on these three insights and followed by more brain storm sessions, we decided to enhance the dim sum dinning experience for both chefs and customers by:
Designed connected devices which can create positive emotional connections and ambient communications between customers and chefs.
/ 3 . Design
Dim Sum restaurant's kitchen may be different, but two things are always the same: steam everywhere and steam baskets stacking all over the place. This makes the lack of vertical space for chefs and they spend most of the time busily on the little preparing tables.
When the customer knocks on a particular point on the table, this device on the chef side creates an image on an acrylic sheet out of steam to convey to the chef that he/she really appreciated the food. On a level below this, we have moving lotus floating on water which gives a glimpse of a traditional Chinese pond to relieve the stress of the chef after a long day's work.
/ 4 . Craft
INPUT: Customer tapping on the dining table
OUTPUT: Chinese painting showing on the chef's table with lotus moving around underneath.
Bill of Materials
Particle Photon ×2
Omron 1185RE8 switch ×1
1000 Ω Resistor ×2
Pump ×1
Humidifier ×1
Tube ×1
Transistor ×1
Servo Motor ×1
Battery pack ×1
Fan ×1
NeverWet ×1
Transparent acrylic ×2
12'' × 12'' Wood board ×6
36 '' Wood board
Wood stick × n
Wood scrap ×n
Jump wires ×n
Code For Dinner Table
int leverButton = D1;
int flag =0;
int flagNew = 0;
void setup()
{
pinMode(leverButton, INPUT_PULLUP);
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop()
{
int leverState;
leverState = digitalRead(leverButton);
if (leverState == 0){ //Knocked
flagNew = 1;
}
else{
flagNew = 0 ;
}
if (flagNew == flag){//state stays the same
/*Serial.println("NO CHANGE IN BUTTON STATE");*/
}
else{
if (flagNew == 1){//someone pushed the button
Particle.publish("diotthanku2");
Serial.println("EVENT PUBLISHED");
delay(5000);
}
else {//the state went back to unpushed
Serial.println("Knock stopped");
}
}
flag = flagNew;
}Code For Kitchen Prep Table
int leverButton = D1;
int flag =0;
int flagNew = 0;
void setup()
{
pinMode(leverButton, INPUT_PULLUP);
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop()
{
int leverState;
leverState = digitalRead(leverButton);
if (leverState == 0){ //Knocked
flagNew = 1;
}
else{
flagNew = 0 ;
}
if (flagNew == flag){//state stays the same
/*Serial.println("NO CHANGE IN BUTTON STATE");*/
}
else{
if (flagNew == 1){//someone pushed the button
Particle.publish("diotthanku2");
Serial.println("EVENT PUBLISHED");
delay(5000);
}
else {//the state went back to unpushed
Serial.println("Knock stopped");
}
}
flag = flagNew;
}
New stories are happening everyday!
Stay in the loop for next update;)