Kim Bryant

A trio of kitchen appliances.

My target market. I wanted my product line to fit in with a range of other brands, filling a gap where many other brands don't exist.

To study my target market, I looked at kitchens. I selected kitchens which demonstrated organization and cleanliness, indicating their owners cook frequently.

To study areas for improvement, I looked at Amazon.com reviews for common kitchen appliances.

I found that all kitchen appliances fall into three main categories: rotating, indirect heating, and direct heating. I designed one appliance for each category. Each appliance may be used with one or more attachments to accomplish virtually any task in the kitchen.

Moving forward with the project, I designed vessels to be used with the induction heater.

The main area I identified for improvement was in lifting and emptying contents from the vessel. I realized the simplest solution would be allow users to hold the vessel itself, so I designed a protective, insulating layer to allow users to actually hold the vessel while pouring from it. I tested the heat resistance of silicone at various thicknesses by holding boiling pots of water and found that at 5mm thickness, virtually no heat is transmitted through the vessel to the hands.

To maintain the simplicity of the device, I designed the interface to allow for a bank of pre-programmed functions which set the heater to stay at a certain temperature. Alternatively, the temperature may still be programmed manually. The final detail of the vessels was an integrated strainer into the lid, making it easy to drain liquid from the vessel.