Cook’s Collage

Abstract

Many people regularly multitask while cooking at home. Juggling household chores, reusing limited kitchen utensils, and coordinating overlapping cooking times for multiple recipes can cause frequent task switching and simultaneous task monitoring while cooking. As a result, the cook occasionally loses track of his cooking progress especially when determining which ingredients have already been added, counting multiple scoops of an ingredient, and keeping watch of cooking times. People compensate for these memory slips by devising memory strategies or deferring to memory aids with varying degrees of success. In this paper, we present a novel memory aid for cooks called Cook's Collage. We describe how the system constructs a visual summary of ongoing cooking activity. Then, we report a task simulation study evaluating the effectiveness of Cook's Collage as a memory aid. We argue that a memory aid is helpful only if it is balanced correctly with a complementary memory strategy and only if the accuracy of the memory aid is trusted. Lastly, we discuss how the six design features of the Cook's Collage suggest a general framework for memory aids in the home, which we term dija vu displays.

Investigating Genres and Perspectives in HCI Research on the Home

“…[10,27,34,45,48,58,63]) involve testing a new technological artifact or prototype in a real setting with participants in their home [11]. In addition, we found less prominent but still very present additional methodologies in HCI domestic technology research: cultural probes [8,28,34] and technology probes [45,53,63,68], smart home experiments [50,69,71,83], and participatory design [54,59,68]. The complex topic of everyday domestic experiences has inspired researchers to refine and reinvent investigative approaches for the home as is evident in the diversity of methodologies we encountered.…”

“…This has led to the adoption of many new methods and approaches to better understand and remain sensitive to the intimate, private nature of the home. Since then, a wide range of research has emerged that has focused on, for example, how social routines bring a sense of social order to everyday life [18,19,82], how family members negotiate communication and coordination practices [12,26,58,72], how resources are consumed and managed [15,67,91], and the social nature of work that unfolds in various domestic sites (e.g., in the kitchen [7,37,83]). There has also been a movement to investigate the experience of mundane everyday practices, such as watching TV [76] or knitting and gardening [36].…”

E-Health, Assistive Technologies and Applications for Assisted Living

“…Rather than developing a general smart-home software platform, the project has been an umbrella under which a variety of distinct research activities have been carried out, most focusing on developing effective human-computer interfaces through which to support people with cognitive and memory impairments. For example, Fetch assists visually impaired people to locate misplaced objects (Kientz, Patel, Tyebkhan, et al, 2006) and Cook's Collage assists seniors in following recipes (Tran, Calcaterra, and Mynatt, 2005).…”

Cognitive Development in Partner Robots for Information Support to Elderly People

“…Various types of useful tools have been developed to support the memory of the elderly [3]. For example, there is a system that reminds us them of things they did in the past by taking snapshots of their kitchen [4]. Most of these kinds of methods, however, are not interactive, which is why communication robots are also used to offer support to the elderly [5].…”