Kenwood

Method collaborated closely with a team with a broad range of specialities, including Kenwood mechanical engineers, marketers, and GlobalLogic developers. Working in an efficient and agile way helped the collective reach a prototyping phase sooner, exploring solutions for various physical and ergonomic problems that could not have been foreseen before testing with users.

By working inclusively with the Kenwood teams, we successfully shifted the conversation within the organization away from an engineering-first mindset to one informed by the needs of the modern home cook and the ergonomics and contextual behaviors within the kitchen environment. Prototyping also enabled more tangible, objective conversations with key stakeholders early on in the process.

Getting into the smart kitchen space is not as simple as putting a new screen on old devices. Incorporating a new digital layer would have significant ramifications for the business, brand, products, and services. Therefore, this project required a considerate, inclusive approach.

Our teams were careful not to ignore the previous 70 years of cooking heritage both from a brand and user perspective. We quickly found that for an optimal user experience, a new digital interface had to integrate with, rather than replace, the physical controls.

The kitchen is a messy, hot and occasionally dangerous environment to place a digital interaction. Technology in the kitchen has frequently prioritized mechanical conventions. Consider a toaster. What do the numbers on a toaster mean? How toasted is 2 vs. 4?

Ingredients provide multi-sensory feedback to the chef through their changes of state: consistency, color, smell, taste. Our understanding of these factors shaped our approach to designing a digital interface specific to food preparation.

Our controls use intuitive language to communicate the intent of the chef, such as “gentle” or “vigorous” instead of speeds 2 and 4. The interface also acknowledges that a cook rarely stands watching an appliance, so it is designed to provide useful visual feedback from a range of distances. For example, the background color of the interface denotes the temperature of the appliance. If the user is too far away to read the numerical temperature on the display, they can still see a warm, orange color from a distance and receive feedback on heat.

RedDot: Product Design Winner 2021
iF World Design Guide: Product Design Winner 2020