At the start of this month, I mused upon time management and handling multiple threads of work. Since those threads are reasonably diverse at the moment, I thought I’d share a bit more about them:

There’s a lot of stuff around redesigning the Ambient Kitchen — three separate threads, I’d say:

1. The underlying software architecture (including,  importantly, how we model the concept of a recipe)
2. How sensors are attached to (or embedded in) utensils
3. Most intriguing of all: the interaction design.

Regarding the third and final thread: there aren’t many precedents for interactions within a smart kitchen, so making it intuitive shall be quite a challenge. This is especially the case when you consider that cooking has a high cognitive load: cooking demands a lot of your attention, so you don’t have a lot of spare energy to figure out a new interface — nor should you have to!

Aside from that, I’m doing a literature review as we explore some ideas about people-building interactions; making some papers camera-ready; preparing a talk for the Highwire students in Lancaster; preparing some portable kitchens for our partners in Education; and working on some other papers.

Never let it be said that this postdoc is dull :)