Designing a connected barbecue

Abstract

Through emerging technologies, it is possible to efficiently extend everyday objects with wireless communication and sensing-/actuating functionality. The objects can communicate with each other as well as with humans. The movement that is concerned with applying and investigating these technologies is called The Internet of Things. What the Internet of Things (IoT) can do for the barbecue was analyzed in this project by research through design. At the beginning one of the opportunities from the initial brief was confirmed by existing research: user performance in barbecuing. Looking at IoT from a perspective where products can be agents, human-product relations are easier to understand and the dialogue between the two became a point of focus. From a technical point of view the challenges of technology in an extreme environment were tackled with IoT features. The relevant variables such as temperature and food type were investigated. Controlling these variables became something that should be the combined effort of user and technology (dialogue). It should reward the user for his efforts since the main problem is that he likes to be at the barbecue but doesn’t think well of his performance. This division of labor was investigated further with design research and philosophy. The new question became how a designer can give meaning to this user-product relation. A tangible user interface (TUI) was found to be able to contribute to the relation since there is a lot of freedom to interact with it. By integrating the opportunities from some of the iterations, Pitmaster was created. It is a barbecue support toolkit that consists of temperature sensors, sensor tongs, timers and a base station. Key features include: timers that become points of focus where a user can see and remember the cooking progress for any type of food. Its accuracy comes from combining the measurement of temperature and food height with guesses from the user that become more educated after his adjustments of parameters and collection of data by the system. During and after the concept evolution the design decisions were generalized and this resulted in more insights that could be interesting for future IoT projects. Lastly, the product’s potential impact was predicted and reflected upon.