Flambé Illumination
04.26.23
An Ingredient
Lighting & System
Brief
The home cook plays every role in the kitchen, unlike a professional chef. How might we design a lighting solution that weathers the chaos of the home cook's process by shaping itself to each task?
Team
Industrial Design & Vis Kush Vakharia
Industrial Design & Fab Giacomo Cascella 🔗
Understanding
To gain insight into the experience of a home cook and how light plays into that experience, we conducted rigourous research and analagous studies, from cooking blindfolded to interviewing woodworkers. Additionally, we compared the roles in the kitchen to the roles in a restaurant. From our research, we boiled the home cooking experience down to 6 key maxims: firstly, light is an ingredient to the cooking experience. The home cook plays every role in the kitchen sequentially; so should the product. The product line should blend into the kitchen when the kitchen is dormant. The home cook brings life to his tools, not the other way around. The process is the star, and light is simply an agent to guide that process. Lastly, chaos is a part of the cooking experience: the product should withstand that chaos.
Embodying
The feeling of satisfaction one recieves from cooking at home and improving their craft had to be infused into the design. Every interaction had to be smooth and controlled, just as a chef uses his knife. This idea of light being an ingredient started to shine through, where we focused on a modular system where light could be plucked off the vine to illuminate the task at hand. Giacomo and I designed the main light module together, with the key feature being its posability: a suction cup would allow it to be placed on any surface. An elegant twist interaction would turn the module on as well as activate suction, keeping the product's use pure and unobtrusive. From there, Giacomo and I split up to design a garnishing stand and a prep stand, respectively. The key interaction for the prep stand was its ability to roll to change the lighting angle, mimicking the action of kneading dough.
The details
Fine details such as the blending of the joints, the smoothness of the surfaces, the alignment of the modules, and the hierarchy of the overall and subshapes were carefully considered to create a visually harmonious and functional product. The CMF choices for the stands were inspired by the rich and diverse world of cooking ingredients, more specifically cooking alcohols. We drew inspiration from these beverages to create four distinct color schemes: Whiskey, Massetto, Champagne, and Sake, utilizing cork's textural properties to create contrast for touchpoints.
