italian kitchen design london
we work as consultants, which means we work with a lot of different companies and a lot of different fields but really, our common interest is in understanding people and what their needs are so if you start to think, well really what these guys do as consultants is focus on people. then, it's easy to think about what's needed design-wise in the kitchen, or, in the hospital, or in the car.
we have clients come to us and say here's our average customer. for instance, female, she's 30-40 years old. she has 2.3 kids, and we listen politely and say, "well, that's great. but..." we don't care about that person. what we really need to do to design is look at the extremes. the weakest, or the person with arthritis,
or the athlete, or the strongest or the fastest person 'cause if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself. these are actually things i haven't seen in a thousand years. try to use less material like here is one that's hollow inside you know, a good friend of mine sam barber he was vacationing with his wife betsy.
i got a phone call one night. he was so excited he said he couldn't sleep. and what he was excited about ishe had been cooking dinner with betsy and she was making an apple tart. and she was complaining about the peeler. that it was hurting her hand. and she had arthritis, and she just couldn't hang on to it. and it hits them
at that moment, that, here is a product that nobody's really thought about and my thought was, well, we can make it work for people with arthritis, could be good for everybody. and we knew that it had to be a bigger handle, you know, kids have big crayons because they are easier to hold on to. it's the same thing for somebody that might not have
full mobility of their hand. they need something a little bit larger. that's a little easier to grip with a little bit less force. so we did a lot of studies around the shape of the handle the size of it. to come up with that size that would be perfect for everybody. but eventually, we found a rubberized bicycle grip and we basically did this.
so, it really goes through many many more iterations than you would think to do a handle that's relatively simple in the end. so i think, one thing with the hand-print here is that you have this constant friction happening like when you are closing it. but if you hold on to it 'cause i feel like, here is the spot that really hurts like, this is the biggest pressure point for me.
so it's like, right in this area on all four fingers. we have friction. so when we start out doing a project, looking at at these different tools, to understand really where, how we can design a better experience for someone ergonomically so really, what we did here was just to map it out. when we did the exercise with the glove and understanding where the pressure points are
and when we sort of go into this process of developing these models one thing we realized with this model if you compare with others hedgers, a lot of them just have a straight handle, so you can't for example, you don't have any control over the weight so if you're cutting far down it means that you have to squeeze harderto hold the tool in place otherwise it's going to slide outunder you hands so with us sort of sculpting this handle area
it sort of locks your hand around the this form so you have to squeeze less. so you have a really secure grip. we're really at the sort of final stages of our design here where we put them into a place where we can control them much more closely to get them ready for manufacture and that is known as cad or computer-aided design
it's very important that we constantly are verifying our cad with physical models once you get into that we use a set of technologies that are called rapid protyping so we can really, finally control the ergonomics of these parts. so these are the two halves that come out of the machine
and you can glue them together tomake an entire handle and attach them to prototype such as this so we can we can really go out and feel the comfort and work with it and makesure that our cad model really represents our design intention the way we think of design is let's put great design into everyday things and understand how to make these gadgets perform better
and that's what we are really always looking for whenever we design, are ways we can improve the way people do things or improve their daily life without them ever really knowing about it or thinking about it.