Innit
IoT Proof of Concept Experience
Role: UXUI Lead, Art Direction
Innit is an Internet of Things (IoT) tech startup with a mission - to empower humanity through food. They want to give food a voice, to let it tell us how best to prepare it and how to reduce waste. Food is life. So let's unlock its full potential.
My team and I brought Innit's "Kitchen of the Future" concept to life, in the form of a beautiful, interactive table top experience.
Project Overview
The concept was envisioned as three experiences that would communicate through Bluetooth and wifi - the smart fridge, prep station, and our kickoff project, the interactive table. To populate the product Epicurious, Bon Appetit, Good Housekeeping and The New York Times became our flagship contributors. Each publication provided a dinner recipe that represented their brand aesthetic.
Testing some early layouts on a UHD screen in real time. We eventually landed on the UX flow pictured below;
1 - Choose a publication
2 - Select your recipe
3 - Personalize recipe by prep time and number of servings
4 - Fitbit integration would recognize the specific user and give them personalized info on the recipe's ingredient content
5 - Where the magic happens - this is the aura, where the dish and all of its ingredients display in charming animations
Ingredient Photography
As we had four recipes to portray in the experience (one for each of the publications) we had the task of photographing every single one of their ingredients.
Challenges were solved as they arose; How best to capture an ingredient so it's a clear read (sliced in half? A top down shot?) or how to portray nondescript items like powders and oils.
We also felt it important that all ingredients stay at scale relative to each other on the touchscreen, even if not to the main dish because of space limitations. Our photographers would have to vary their zoom on the assorted ingredients to capture their unique details. By adding a silver quarter to each shot, our off-site Production Artists could deliver globally uniform sized PNGs to our project Developer which would then be fed into the tabletop database.
Additional Features
The tabletop would be connected via Bluetooth to a smart-refrigerator. If ingredients are missing from the fridge, those items will dim on the tabletop and a yellow cart icon appears over them.
Tap that icon to launch a shopping cart that locates the closest grocery store and lists the missing ingredients. A partnership with Instacart would guarantee delivery in an hour.
Tap on any ingredient to launch its "halo", a deep dive into nutritional information, including when the item was bought and best usage date. The smart-fridge will be preset with hundreds of ingredients' shelf dates (and constantly updated) that cross check the bar code sticker on items.
