PROBLEM STATEMENT
Address the qualities embodied in the everyday from an interaction design perspective. Explore the relation between the designed artifacts and the everyday they are involved in. Capture the everyday and design towards it.
— PROJECT NAME
Design for the Infraordinary
— ROLE
User Research
Prototyping
Video Editing
— DATE
09/12/2018
The everyday, it is about going to sleep, waking up, cleaning, eating, dressing and undressing, reading, drinking tea or coffee. It is the flow of the infraordinary (Perec, 1989) and the banal, away of the extraordinary and of the memorable. It is the process of cooking, preparing and cutting. For this project, the use of a cutting board was inspected down to the finest detail. A redesign was iterated which emphasized other everyday interactions such as turning a page.
IDEATION
Cooking, it’s a chore some hate and it’s an undertaking others love. It’s also a routine we are all used to doing almost every day and therefore the perfect subject for this project. While investigating the use of a cutting board, the realization that one board is used for multiple food types arose. Not necessarily a problem waiting to be tackled. However, the cumbersome process of putting your sliced vegetables in a temporary container or back into the basket they came from in order to cut your meat was. Additionally, food residue was either left in corners, minimizing cutting space, or scraped off the cutting board onto the counter.
The initial redesign included a multitude of different sized boxes hidden underneath the board. Each time the chef of the day finished slicing a product, a box could be used for storage until it was time to add the product to the frying pan. Boxes stayed attached through small magnets and a bigger sixed box in the middle was the designated residue box. The edges stretching the width of the cutting board were designed to gather small residue which did not have to be put in the trash box directly.
USER
RESEARCH
The first iteration was tested within a group of fellow people working on other everyday projects. Users were asked to cut multiple peppers while thinking out loud. No other commands or restrictions were mentioned as we observed their actions and behavior.
MINIMIZING BOXES
Resulting from the user test, it was decided to only use three bigger boxes to put food in. Most users remarked the difficulty of finding the inner boxes and thus the impracticality. With three boxes, meat could still be separated from vegetables and trash but action speed improved.
TURNING A PAGE
Users remarked that they often use two cutting boards for hygienic reasons. Iteration two incorporated this by ensuring the board could be flipped. This move was smoothened and inspired by the act of turning a page, seamless and uninterrupted.
FINAL
DESIGN
The final redesign only included three, equal sized boxes which could be pushed and taken from underneath the cutting board. A handle was created at the long sides of each box by taking away a semicircle. Additionally, a hole in the middle of the base board made it possible to easily slide away residue without interrupting the cutting process too much. With a slight indent at each side of the base board, flipping the cutting board became effortless.
FINAL
FEEDBACK
Feedback mentioned the practicality of storing trash underneath the cutting board, seamless movement of flipping the board and right amount of boxes provided. It also included the difficulty of grabbing the board once slippery and the incentive to push the boxes inwards rather than out.