Smart Kitchen

Imagine a world where you walk into the kitchen and tell your cabinets and refrigerator what you’re making for dinner. The cabinets and refrigerator listen and grab all your ingredients for you and put them countertop for you. This is a design fiction that will making cooking a lot more luxurious and less time consuming. For example, a busy Mother of four who has just picked up children from school who hasn’t prepped anything for dinner. Instead of stopping at the nearest fast-food restaurant to feed the children she knows he will have enough time to prep and cook dinner before the kids are done with their homework. When the family walked into the home, she told the children to wash up and start their homework while she gave kitchen the meal and ingredients she will be cooking tonight. While she goes to check on the children to make sure they are okay washing up the cabinets and refrigerator placed all of her ingredients on the countertop for her. This allowed her to come down and immediately start cooking since all of her ingredients are in front of her. The cabinets and refrigerator both have conveyor belts which allow them to transport the ingredients throughout the kitchen and end up on the countertop. The refrigerator and cabinets will have mics in them that will pick up the sound after the command word ‘Meal help” is shouted. This is so the kitchen isn’t listening 24/7. The smart kitchen would alleviate some of the stress of cooking and make it more enticing. This would also lead to more people in the kitchen which would lead to less fast-food consumption and a heathier life for most. The smart kitchen would reflect the kitchen that was in the home from Ray Bradbury’s the felt. I believe that the intent of the kitchen would be to make every day cooking easier and more efficient for individuals who handles their households’ meals. The smart kitchen will also be updated both with the software and with physical parts as well. This would be able to happen after the kitchen has collected data from the user which would allow us to make the necessary updates to enhance the user experience. Once the smart kitchen is implemented into a home an according to “Ubiquitous Computing Functions” there would need to a stronger evaluation done to build the end users applications for the ubi comp system. It would look something like the evaluation done on the Context tool kit which was used to build several applications like the DUMMBO Meeting Board. It would also allow for our research team to record their data and decide if whether the building blocks of the smart kitchen’s applications is helping our developers reach their goals. Since this would be a very complex system with both the cabinets and refrigerator interacting with the user, we would need see it in use to answer some underlying system components. I think this was a core issue throughout Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” if the family who lived in the smart home had all their Ubicomp systems data recorded and sent back to the developers to receive more answers. The home would end up being less destructive to the family. In the “The Veldt” none of their Appliances had been tested they lived in a very futuristic home which led them to encounter problems they never thought they would. If our smart kitchen becomes to over developed, we may end up doing what the smart home did to the parents in “The Veldt” which is leaving them feeling like they have no purpose. In developing the smart kitchen if we made our user feel like they had no purpose It would lead to a less desirable user experience after long term use. This is exactly what happened to George and Lydia Hadley in “The Veldt”. George and Lydia felt like getting their smart home they haven’t been taking care of their children on their own the home has. Once a user has the feeling that the appliance is doing the job better of taking care of their family the intended feeling it was supposed to give is now lost. George and Lydia began to lose a grip over their own children because they allowed their smart appliances raise their children which was the main problem in “The Veldt”. Therefore, the Smart Kitchen will be developed to best of its capabilities it can be for helping a human complete a meal or course of meals. One thing the smart kitchen does not and will not have to maintain human interaction is the ability to defrost and meat or frozen ingredient for the user. The second would be that they’re no cutting feature which would cut and peel any ingredients that need so. In not adding these features there will always be a need for human interaction which is what the smart kitchen needs for it to be successfully in what it’s being developed for. If we developed our product with these two features, we would be building close to a complete autonomous kitchen which would be very pointless for those who like to cook meals for their loved ones. Lydia Hadley is a perfect example of that. She loved to cook meals for her and her family but after moving into the smart home which could take care of all the family needs without her help. Lydia was beginning to feel devastated from not receiving the feeling of joy from taking care of her family anymore. Human interaction with technology is what developed has led to this development of the third era of computing which is what would allow for us to develop the smart kitchen. The smart kitchen would be focused on becoming the best helping hand possible for the user in the kitchen. The technology’s main purpose would be to make cooking less daunting and time consuming by being a helping hand. Its purpose would never be meant solely to take over the cooking as a whole for the family.

Work Cited:

Bradbury, Ray. The Veldt. Perfection Learning Corporation, 2000.

Krumm, John. Ubiquitous Computing. 2022.