The Brief
How to manage various ingredients in your kitchen in a smart grocery jar
Ever wondered how design for tech can help you transform your ordinary kitchen into a smart kitchen? An apt use case in a kitchen is the constant storage and replenishment of groceries. So what if the most common accessory or product in your kitchen is the one that keeps a track on your inventory and creates a shopping list on your smartphone, and gets it delivered directly to your doorstep. To look at this possibility, we came up with a smart grocery jar, named STOK.
STOK is the property of Artifact Designs LLP and Analogy and is currently patent pending. Any reproduction of this content has to be approved by Analogy and must be intimated before publishing on any medium.
CLIENT
Inhouse Experimental
SERVICES
Focussed Market Research
UI Design
Dashbaord Design
Ux Design
Assets Design
UI Animation
Packaging
Design Language
Concept Generation
Design Engineering
Product Architecture
Visualization
Prototyping
Production Support
Awards
India's Best Design Award 2018
YEAR
2017-18
2018-19
2019-20
The Intent
STOK is a hassle-free device in your kitchen. It keeps a track of your groceries and notifies you on your mobile phone of what’s empty, through the app, which you can use to place an order at your convenience store. You can also place the order through a voice-enabled system like Alexa, Google mini, or any online ordering service like Amazon, Big Basket, or Grofers.
STOK is not just made smart by adding valuable technology to it, but we pushed our boundaries to rethink the whole architecture of the conventional, boring looking kitchen jars.
The Opportunity
The Home Kitchen
Smart Recipies
Efficient Ingredient usage
Running out of Ingredients
Discover new ways to cook
Track your inventory
Seamless automation
Understanding Business, Visual and Functional Challenges
In 2018, the number of companies harnessing IoT capabilities in the field of smart home systems will continue to rapidly increase. Technological advancements that continue to add new capabilities and features have been made with better and more powerful sensors and data collection. With the advent of AI and ML combined with IoT, the entire paradigm of smart kitchen devices has been steadily rising and as designers and technologists, we have been constantly striving to create the right balance.
With our daily schedule getting more and more hectic, we tend to postpone our grocery shopping and the access to fresh ingredients and healthy eating is affected. When postponed, we forget to add items to that list. Why should one settle for eating a sandwich with no ketchup?
Identifying
The Problems to focus on
Inventory
Shopping
Ergonomics
Ecosystem
Solving for
The User & Environment
The Solution
A Smart human-centric jar for the kitchen
Active monitoring of groceries by pinging alerts directly to your phone
Ai software to image process ingredients without the need for looking.
Wireless charging base to incorporate seamless charging.
A subscription based pricing model
Load cell, Bluetooth and wifi combined to create a very accurate measuring system.
Identifying
Opportunity & Features
Through a concentrated process of research, user observation, surveys, and intuitive reasoning we were able to figure out a variety of gaps with existing products in the marketplace that we’re in the same category but without the impact or the features that could help a consumer actually buy and use this product..
The Solution
Modular Smart Jar
The smart jar is a simple, connected device with a mechanical load cell and the Bluetooth transmitter. The load cell measures the weight of the ingredients in the jar. And the Bluetooth transmitter projects the information to the app on your phone.
Data-Driven App
The App displays and also stores key information on buying and storage patterns to predict the behaviour of individuals so that the product and the app can adapt to their unique lifestyle. It also helps remind consumers and can add value to making their daily grocery shopping a breeze.
Solving for
Space & Repeatability
The Jars had to pretty much be the same footprint as existing jars in a user’s kitchen so we had to work with understanding the dimensions of the existing products to adapt the STOK smart jar. This also meant compressing the electronics and sensors into a compact product architecture.
Feature ideation
Design Visualisation
From CAD to Visualisation
From early on in the design process, we continued to follow this iterative cycle of generating ideas, getting into cad, and visualize the idea quickly which helped refine the form, features, and functional aspects of the product.
Understanding your user is understanding the product experience
Throughout the design process, we kept our focus trained on the users who would adopt this product in their homes and we have focussed on creating a simple and seamless tech experience where the tech works as its supposed but is never at the forefront. It's reliable and can add great value to the product features, but is never overtly displayed in a techy way. We have always strived to bring the human aspect to the forefront.
Storyboarding
How a Smart Grocery Jar works
Features
A family of Jars
Various users need different sizes in the jars so we built a family of small to large jars that could be used in the kitchen to store a variety of ingredients. For example, who would store kilos of salt anyways right ??
Features
Built for an easy pour
The top lid can be moved and held in place to dispense the right amount of ingredients. For example, if you had to pour our sugar or salt which would be in small amounts, the lid can be opened up slightly. Also, the sides being rectilinear would help in dispensing larger ingredients more easily. The corners of the jar create a natural mouth for an easy pour of ingredients
Features
Built for Laminar flow
The Jar is made out of Tritan which is a pretty hard material and also is quite environmentally friendly and lasts long. The inner profile of the jar has a slight draft angle built not only for manufacturing reasons but also so that the ingredients poured don’t stick to the walls and the inside is completely polished with a texture that helps the pour of ingredients in a laminar flow rather than getting gulps of them one pour at a time.
Features
Expandable Cap
During research, we found that most ingredients transferred from retail packaging to a jar always have some leftover in the packaging due to inconsistencies in various manufacturers packing their ingredients. To solve this, we designed a cap with an accordion that flexes to create 20% more space so that there is no leftover plastic packaging on your kitchen shelves.
Features
Compact & Smart
The sensors, the battery, light indicators, and the wireless charging circuits are all built into the bottom of the jar so as to not impede the natural function of the jar. In order to keep the jar light, we have used simple and accurate sensors that can connect to the app and share the right data when needed only.
Features
Assign & connect your smart grocery jar
When you get a new jar or you want to use an existing STOK jar to reassign an ingredient, the accompanying smart app helps you to assign the right ingredient by a combination of scanning the actual ingredient as well as assigning a unique tag to each ingredient. In case you are replacing an ingredient in the jar, it’s as easy to reassign by removing the old ingredient and replacing it with the new one.
Features
Charge your device
STOK is designed to charge rapidly and very quickly considering the battery in the device is extremely small as the load cell combined with various sensors doesn’t require that much power. Charging your device is easy with the wireless charging pad to charge multiple jars at the same time.
Features
Ingredient details
Every ingredient assigned to a jar also pulls various information like calories, nutritional values etc which can be assigned to each individual ingredient via the library.
Features
Home & Statistics
The Home screen on the app contains all the necessary information about your jar and the other connected STOK jars in your kitchen giving you a complete inventory count of what is low and the ingredients in your pantry.
Features
Integrated Shopping
To make purchasing daily groceries easy, the app integrates with third-party services like Amazon groceries or Big basket or worldwide any online grocery chain with a simple API link. This helps consumers order ingredients directly when you get a notification that you are running low.
Features
Smart Notifications
Notifications, when you are running out of ingredients, is inbuilt into the app so that the connected app can alert a user when they are running low on a particular ingredient. Each time you get a notification there is also an option to reorder through the preferred grocery app already connected.
Packaging
A Compact Pack
In order to maintain superior user experience, we designed a simple yet clean packaging which has a small footprint and contains all the components of the smart jar in clear compartments, this comes with an included user manual and charging cable.
Awards
We were selected amongst multiple participants to win ” Indias Best Design Award” for the project.
