Kitchen Club
Overview
Kitchen Club is an app and physical product designed in response to the prompt "How might we encourage adults and children to be invested in food and nutrition as a family?"
Background
Finding time to cook food and think about health and nutrition is hard enough when you only have to worry about your own needs and preferences. If you're a working parent and also have to consider what your child wants or needs, it's likely you'll want to give up entirely on cooking and rely on take-out instead. If that's the case, you're not alone!
The goal of the Kitchen Club is to relieve the stress off of parents by curating meals based on what the child wants, and improve family time spent in the kitchen.
The goal of the Kitchen Club is to relieve the stress off of parents by curating meals based on what their child wants, and improve family time spent in the kitchen. The inspiration for this project came from my childhood memories of cooking together with my family, and the strong connection that I formed to food because of those times.
Process & Research
Kitchen Club makes it easy to customize families on a single device, or across multiple devices. When synced across multiple devices, children are able to enjoy a unique personalized experience on their own device. Much of the decision making is given to the child to help keep them invested in the process, and to take the stress off the parents. During set-up the parent is able choose approved recipes from a recipe database, which are then added to the child side of the app. The child is able to choose what they want to eat from the approved recipes, and can play a decision based game to learn how to make each recipe. When it comes time to cook, the parent and child can each follow along with their parts of the recipe on their own devices (or split screen on one device).
How It Works
Kitchen Club has two sides, one for the child and one for the parent(s). Kitchen Club covers all of the essentials in the cooking process from grocery lists to walk-through tutorials. It is easy to customize family profiles and features on a single device, or across multiple devices. When synced across multiple devices, children are able to enjoy a unique personalized experience on their own device.
When it comes to meal planning, much of the decision making is given to the child to keep them invested in the process, and to take the stress of daily meal planning off of the parents. Parents are given control over dietary restrictions, budget, and number of meals per week. These settings determine what meals the child is able to learn, and how many tutorial levels they can play through. Tutorials levels can be replayed as many times as the child would like in order to improve their success score.
When it comes to meal planning, much of the decision making is given to the child to keep them invested in the process, and to take the stress of daily meal planning off of the parents.
Once children have learned the steps and and techniques for a recipe, a real-time walkthrough of the recipe becomes available for the parent(s) and child to use while cooking. This recipe walkthrough provides detailed instructions to the chef (child) and sous-chef (parent), for which tools to use and how to prepare and cook the food.
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Once the dish is completed, Kitchen Club shows the Chef (child) how to plate and photograph the food for the photo album. The dots around the edge of each plate are used to line up with guides in the camera window for consistent photography. This makes it easy for the child to track their progress over time.
What's in the Kit?
Activation Code for app on up to four devices (2 parents, 2 children)
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4 Plates
For Parent:​
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Knife
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Cutting Board
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Frying Pan
For Child:​
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Veggie Peeler
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Spatula
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Mixing Bowl