July 2007 Mechanical Engineering: Editorial

editorial

counter intelligence

By
John G. Falcioni,
Editor-in-Chief

I'll confess. I like kitchen tools more than garden tools. And even though I enjoy watching This Old House on PBS, I'm fascinated by The Food Network's Good Eats, and its irreverent host, Alton Brown.

During the past season, Alton hosted Kitchens of the Future, where he showed off old and new cooking gadgets. A few of them I can recollect seeing in my mother's kitchen when I was a kid, some are gathering dust in my own drawers at home, and others are so out there you're not likely to find them at the local Crate & Barrel.

For as long as people have been cooking—and even before—there's always been someone trying to figure out a new way to slice bread, decorate cakes, grate cheese, boil water, or kill a woolly mammoth. But as any chef of the future will tell you, it often takes more than simple imagination to come up with a newfangled way to core an apple. Kitchen gadgetry has gone high-tech, and none other than the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology is leading the way.

MIT Media Lab's Context-Aware Computing group and its Counter Intelligence/Design Intelligence special interest group focus on domestic product design. The director of the lab, Ted Selker, showed Alton some of the doohickeys they're working on and the unlikely equipment they're repurposing.

An engraving machine from an industrial laser manufacturer, for example, is being used to mark food products with logos, graphics, and nutritional information, directly onto products such as the Pop-Tart.

Though it's not likely you'll have a need to write a note on the next hot dog you grill up, many of the gizmos do have practical applications. Some will work as products, Selker said; some won't. Once a good idea is developed, it is offered to manufacturers for commercialization.

(Associate Editor Alan Brown, in this issue, tells us how a sound technical idea from four recent Princeton University engineering graduates, involving electric power, is evolving into commercialization.)

In one example of its extensive work with sensors, the MIT lab developed a sensor that when placed on the lid of a plastic container detects what's inside. It also counts down the hours left until the contents go bad. Another example is a pair of oven mitts that have built-in temperature sensors. The mitts also talk, chatting up phrases such as, "The food should be checked in 40 minutes." Then there's the spoon that doubles as a thermometer.

Other contraptions, like the "dishmaker," inflate variable mold wafers into the appropriate shape and depth dishes, then recycles them and stores them compactly as thin discs. Then there's the newfangled silicon rubber kitchen sink that adjusts its height automatically, and the refrigerator that shows you what's inside without opening it (there's a camera inside and a screen outside on the door). This fridge also lets you know if you're running out of items, say eggs, and adds it to a virtual shopping list that automatically places an order with a grocery store. The spice rack that indicates what spice to use in a given recipe is pretty nifty, too.

Some of these items will go the way of the proposed dishwasher of yesteryear. You don't remember it? It attached to a table and loaded dirty dishes and utensils automatically. This invention, I surmise, was scrapped by a Whirlpool executive who unwittingly left important documents on the table as it was being swept into the rinse cycle.

You never know when the next great kitchen idea will come along. I'm OK with that, as long as it makes good eats.