Speculative Design

The task of this design project was to synthesize the ideas from the inclusive kitchen and diversifying recipe together to create a design intervention that helps to combat inhibiting inclusion and diversity. I had already thought of this synthetization before creating the two other projects, so combining came quite easy. What I ended up doing is taking the mixer portion of the first design and having the application, from the second project, uploaded onto the tablet. This way the users are able to get a diverse range of recipes that are available in any language, written or spoken, have substitution suggestions and uses the scale for measuring.
As aforementioned in the previous two projects the design problem that the two different parts individually were supposed to help, are making the kitchen a safe place for everybody and diversifying recipes. This design solution is no different and just builds upon the problems of kitchens being inaccessible to people with different needs including visually, physically, and auditory, which limits safety, independence, and social interaction. As well as, being unable to make different recipes and explore different cultures due to language barriers based on the language the recipe is written in and the ingredients the recipe uses.
For this design process, it was mostly coping and pasting elements of the first two designs together. I recreated the mixer from the first design project by tracing it in Adobe Illustrator. During this time, I also simplified the design a bit to include fewer buttons because throughout the process I realized how overwhelming it would be. This version of the design has one button for each of the commands and is able to be fully voice-controlled to allow for the simplification. For the application from the second design project I copied an entire screen and fit it on the tablet from the mixer. I did not end up changing anything for this aspect of the design apart from making sure to clarify that verbal translations would also be available for each of the recipes. This was an element I forgot to include in the second design project, that I found was needed because there are visually impaired users who would also not understand the language the recipe is in. Due to these changes that I made on the design throughout the process, I did not experience a lot of challenges. If I had not simplified the mixer, I could see having a hard time being able to redraw the design in illustrator due to room constraints. Thus, I proactively responded to the challenging by simplifying it beforehand.
This speculative experience taught me a lot as I combined two of my previous design projects together. Overall, everything seemed to work as planned because I took the time to think of how the designs could be combined together as I designed the second project. The only thing that did not work though was putting the application onto the tablet screen in the visualization. This is because the screen was quite small compared to the rest of the design and the application become lost and hard to read. There was not much I could do to mitigate this as I tried to keep the scale of the tablet in mind when compared to the mixer. This involvement in the design process taught me how to synthesize designs as it was not something I had ever needed to do before as directly as this project made it. Usually, I took one small element from one design and put it with another design as a synthesizer. How this helped me evolve as an inclusive designer is giving me the knowledge and skills to design for both inclusiveness and diversity by synthesizing design together.