Communicating "Homemade Cooking" through a new kitchen product.

Abstract

This master thesis researched Homemade Cooking and how to communicate this experience through the sensory modalities. In order to find what the qualities of Homemade Cooking were and what kind of product would be interesting to develop three studies were carried out during this eight month thesis project: a contextmapping study (qualitative), a questionnaire study (quantitative) and an evaluative study (qualitative). The contextmapping study revealed wishes of the users and their view on what Homemade Cooking is. This resulted in a list of qualities that can be attributed to Homemade Cooking. These qualities were subsequently validated using the questionnaire study. This study showed that Homemade Cooking is: healthy, tasty, happy, friendly, informal, safe, open, honest, retro and human. The same questionnaire also presented the respondents with four design concepts (based on the results from the contextmapping study). Out of four concept proposals one concept proved to be the most promising for the respondents because it fitted the most with Homemade Cooking and their households. The qualities of Homemade Cooking were subsequently taken into account to detail the design on a sensory level (e.g. materials, visual appearance, sounds). The result is the Steammet. The Steammet is a (modular) two person tabletop cooking device which can steam, grill and broil food. The products curvature and materials was designed to allow for a friendly look and feel, while the use of silicon materials muffles the sound aiming to create a friendly auditive character. A look and feel prototype was constructed to be used in the evaluative study. The evaluative study showed that the Steammet can be seen as a product which communicates Homemade Cooking quite well while the participants were enthusiastic about the product’s functionality.