Pleasure of manual kitchen products: A checklist for designing manual kitchen tools

Abstract

As the heart of the home, the kitchen is always a happening place. It can be used to entertain family, cook that holiday meal, or just scrounge for the latest snack. Kitchen tools have an important role in creating entertainment and pleasure in the kitchen. Depending on consumers’ preferences, they can have a chef’s kitchen with professional tools, such as a good set of knives. Or users can enjoy their own modern host’s kitchen, with a bar, counter stools, and plenty of baking tools. As people have increasing expectations for their kitchen products, it will be important to designing pleasurable, high quality manual kitchen tools. In the future, designing pleasurable kitchen tools would allow consumers to use and enjoy the products at the same time. This study will use research to explore the most important elements that a pleasurable kitchen product could have and develop a process for designing pleasurable kitchen products. In order to develop a checklist for designing pleasurable kitchen products, one rule that needs to be understood is that products affect users not only physically but also psychologically. There are three different types of pleasure with products: The emotional, hedonic and practical benefits associated with products. Pleasure with products comes from the relationship between a person and a product (Jordan, 2003). Therefore, pleasurability is not a property of a product but of interaction with that product. After studying physical and psychological pleasure feelings and ergonomics associated with manual kitchen tools, as well as “the four pleasures” (Tiger, 1992), a checklist for designing pleasurable kitchen tools will be developed in this thesis. All the elements mentioned above are iii considered in this checklist. A final physical redesigned model that follows the new checklist will also be included. By applying these guidelines, a better user experience could be expected.