Prototyping

been busy today buying steel and tool dip and making prototypes. Here is what I have been up to today....all day...and night

I think I am on to something here....finnaly

I found a tool that have been looking for to pull inspiration off of the Ice Axe. It is beefy, manly, has the essence of and allure of adventure and, works with my title, wonderful story possibilities.

I stopped by Jerry's this morning and and picked up some 1/8 in weldable steel and tool dip to make some prototypes with

I did some picture mash-up in Photo Shop, that I am going to print off and do some sketches off of to really get the form down a bit.

here are my newest mash ups:

some things I have been looking at

personal connections to kitchen tools

This is an article I found on personal connections to kitchen tools on the blog "The Improvised Life"

the oddness and power of real cook’s tools

Ellen Silverman

Just about every cook I know has a favorite fork or a spoon that they use for all sorts of purposes in the kitchen; they reach for it before any other tool when they need to toss or stir or shift something in a pan, because it feels right in their hand, makes them feel right in the kitchen, and able to deal with whatever comes up.

Ellen Silverman took a picture of mine. I am certain that each utensil in this odd assortment HELPS me to cook. Each has a unique feel of its own. All are balanced, attuned in some special way that helps me to listen to whatever I am making. These implements are so much a part of my cooking that I am often not aware of all the different things I do with them.

They are the opposite of kitchen catalogue offerings; all except one are cheap and beat-up. They all have stories.

The long, skinny fork is a fondue fork I bought as a set at the flea market years ago. The length is perfect, like a smaller, more elegant version of a two-or-three pronged cooking fork. I use it daily for tossing and spearing things, or peeking under something that is browning in a pan. It is the perfect fork for eating private bowls of salad.

The extraordinarily thin, long wooden spoon was brought to me by a friend from Colombia, South America. Though it looks like a doll’s spoon, to my hand, it has a much better feel than regular wooden spoons, more sensitive somehow to whatever I am stirring or tossing. My boyfriend uses it to stir the coffee he makes Brazilian-style: freshly ground beans dumped into a little pot of barely simmering water and stirred until it’s just on-the-verge of boiling again, then poured through a filter. That spoon is part of his waking up.

The silver spoon was forged by my friend Holton Rower, who is an artist. It makes me feel like an artist too. It is the perfect sauce-making spoon, made for tasting from either end. It is so beautiful, I use it as a serving spoon as well.

The silverplate fork with the bent tine was my Greek grandmother’s. She used it for everything: to make scrambled eggs, to spear a baked potato, to toss long strands of thick macaroni with clarified butter and aged Sheep’s milk cheese, as an accompaniment to her Kapama, a cinnamon-scented lamb stew. I don’t use the fork often, but keep it as a kind of talisman in my utensil drawer, to see whenever I open it, and remind me of my grandmother and a lineage of cooks that came before me…

and here is the link

had a slight freak out and just need to think for a little bit

I talked with Wonhee a bit earlier to day about dropping the idea I had and just design handles for kitchen tools scene I have been doing a lot of research on them anyway. She said that that was ok (as she let out a heavy sigh).

And the more I thought about it, the more it felt like I was giving up. and as my mantra goes:"Play hard. Work harder. Have fun. Find your limits and test them. Always get right back up, NEVER stay down. NEVER give up."

so I wrote an email to Garth Morgan to see if I could talk with him about my product and have a jam session to help work out my idea.

I decided to let him know what I knew about my product so he would be up to date on it and that actualy helped me work out some of the issues I has having.

Anyway here is a bit of the email I sent:

Right now I am really in not a good spot with this project. My research never paned out no mater where I looked, I could not find any conclusive demographic data that I could use. I even have a friend that works for Nielsen and he couldn't help me very much.

So I have been looking the handles of kitchen tools, hand tools, power tools, and sports equipment and how they relate to the function of the object and I have not found any thing that I am excited about. (and yes I am complaining a bit)

Here is what I do know about my product right now:

Demographic: I have dropped the bachelor part and just made it for men

Name: RTK- Reclaim The kitchen

General size and proportions: over sized about 15 inches long- the handle will be about 5 inches long and and a hefty 1.25-1.5 diameter, a 5 inch neck length, and a tool head length of about 5 inches of about 3.5 to 5 inches wide

Materials: I want it to be all one material so seams for things to get in to and grow germs, preferably nonstick pan safe. what this material is I do not know.....may be two materials if the structural core is completely coated....... so maybe steel core with silicone covering

Tools: I want there to be 4 tools in the set- spatula, slotted spoon, spoon/ladle, and tongs. I want to prototype two of these but I think I will only get to one with the time I have left. The tools I want to prototype are the spatula and the tongs, if I have the time, as I think they would be the easiest to do at this point

What is looks like: I have no idea.....but I have been looking at mountaineering tools while I have been writing this and I think that might be what I have been looking for..maybe.... ice hammers and such...hummmmmmmmm

so that is the summery of what I know for sure about my product right now.

YAY I HAVE MY BRAIN BACK!!!!!!

ok I recognize I am behind and not in a very good place as far as progress on my project right now, this is due to the fact that I have been sick scene the midterm and I was working on ¼ brain power. The cold and flu stuff are mostly gone now and I have my energy and brain power back, getting the engines restarted and revved up…..


Due to the fact that I was sick and that I could not find a chef to talk to me about cooking utensils, I polled studio for what tools people use on a day to day bases I came up with the most common things that came up are knife, spatula, spoon, and fork. And after a few hours of searching the web I found an article on Squidoo.com stating that the basic 5 tools you need are silicone spatula/scrapers that are safe up to 600 F and a set of 4 tools consisting of a spoon, a slotted spoon an spatula and a pasta scoop.

Also with my regained thinking and reasoning powers (woke up this morning and I could actually think clearly again) I started looking at existing kitchen tool sets they all varied a bit in what they consisted of but I am going for the bare minimum needed to do your day to day cooking.

So I have made a bit more progress: I have nailed down what exact utensils are going to be in my RTK Cooking Tool line the plan as of now is that I am going to prototype a spoon and a spatula and draw up designs for a slotted spoon pasta scoop and a rubber/silicone scraper and spatula thingy.

Here is a link to the article: link

talk with Donald

I had a talk with Donald today about my project 1. I explained my concept about using the concept of fetishism in the contest of how people and especially men, put special meaning on objects or identify with object due to their aesthetic aspects and or function, to design a line of cooking tools for men.

My original intent with the project was to create a line of cooking utensils that were designed specifically for bachelors. I have dropped the bachelors bit due to my seeming lack of ability to find any conclusive demographic data, or rather any usable demographic data really. The plan with this data was to find out what the major interests of a specific age group was, ie.: most liked bands/musical artists, TV shows, sporting events, ect.. and look at these things and try to pull a visual language out of these different elements and meld them together to use to inspire a the design of this line of cooking utensils. Since this has not worked out I have turned to looking at hand tools and other masculine objects.

Donald and I talked about using the esthetics of hand tools and some how using the aesthetic of the gun. I am not quite sure about pursuing using the aesthetic of the gun putting on the back burner for now and maybe pulling something out of that pot later on (…..hehehe I made a cooking pun)

We talked about my trip to Jerry’s and Heartwicks and what my findings were from that which I posted on my previous blarg entry. One of the findings I posted was that in a product line of cooking tools, all of the tools had the essentially the same handle with very minor adjustments here and there depending on the tool, and the tool heads all matched the aesthetic of the handle. So the plan was to derive a handle that I liked and then design a few tool heads off of that.

Donald thought this was a good way to approach it, but that if I took this approach and stuck with the tool handle idea it need to be much much bolder, which I agreed with. He suggested I look in to more heavy industrial tools like airplane mechanic tools. He also told me that I would need to design at least 3 of the tools out of this product line………….. soo I kinda need to hop on it and get to work…..

Oh I made a kinda shoddy prototype on Tuesday to mass out the my ideas and see what the actual size of the object would be.

back from the mostly almost dead but not really- mostly

Ok so I have essentially been sick since the midterm, which means I have been loopy and out of it and not been able to think very clearly at all, and on top of the having a few too many projects going on at once. So that is why I have not posted in a few weeks.

Last week I went to Jerrys hardware store and Heartwicks kitchen store to look at and compare the handles of the hand tools and the cooking utensils. I found the shape of the hand tools were specifically developed for the function of the tool. With the kitchen tools, this was not the case.

While the handles of the hand tools varied a lot it was to support the function of the specific type of tool. The kitchen utensils handles were the same for all the tools in the product line, with slight tweezing depending on the tool, if there was any change in the handle at all.