IA Collaborative | GIZMODO.cz

Coffee roasting has a pretty interesting history. There was a time when the Arabs had control over pretty much all the coffee cultivation in the world (Arabica beans come from Ethiopia, where they were originally cultivated) and in order to maintain their monopoly, the Arabs would export coffee beans worldwide but would roast them beforehand. These roasted beans would be packed with flavor, and would create the coffee craze we’re familiar with around the world, but it would also mean heavy dependence on Arabia because you couldn’t grow the roasted beans. This was until a few lucky people managed to smuggle raw beans out of Arabia and to places around the world (like Baba Budan who would carry beans to India in the 14th century where he would set up a massive plantation in and around the Malabar region). The practice, however, of roasting beans before shipping them stuck around (in order to preserve them better and increase their shelf life), creating a sort of brand dependency in the modern world.

Coffee connoisseurs believe that the beans are best consumed immediately after they’re roasted, and while they do last longer after roasting (resulting in a higher shelf life), their flavor gradually deteriorates. Kelvin hopes to change the status quo, by letting you roast your beans just minutes before you consume them… giving you not just the freshness you deserve, but also the freedom to choose how strong you want your roast to be. Roasting your own coffee also helps you directly support the coffee-growers by buying the raw beans from them, and giving them their share of the profit.

The tabletop roaster uses air to evenly cook your raw coffee beans to a beautiful toasty brown consistency. Occupying a palm’s width of space, the Kelvin (named rather appropriately after the unit of temperature) allows you to be in control of your roast, choosing your roast time. A simple knob is the only UI on the device. Twist it to set the roast time and the Kelvin takes care of everything else. It heats the beans right up to the correct temperature, giving you a well-balanced roast, filters out any of the chaff/husk that comes off during the roasting process, and even cools the beans down post-roasting, making them ready for the grinder.

Partnering with various farmers, Kelvin also delivers the green beans straight to your doorstep. Designed to be an ecosystem rather than a simple product, Kelvin gives you the freedom of choice, letting you choose beans from different regions and having them delivered to your home. The freedom to roast the beans to a desired level is the second step in enforcing customer choice, so you don’t need to rely on store-bought beans anymore. In doing so, Kelvin claims that you won’t just have better tasting coffee at your fingertips, you’ll end up saving money too, by not pandering to big-brand-markups and their packaging/logistical charges, while contributing directly to the livelihood of the coffee growers, who often live at the mercy of these big brands.

The Kelvin Coffee Roaster is a winner of the iF Design Award, the IDEA (International Design Excellence Award), and the American Good Design Award, for its innovative and compact roasting process, clean design and interface, as well as its holistic system design.

Designer: IA Collaborative

Click here to Buy Now: $229.00 ~~$329.00~~

Kelvin lets you custom roast fresh beans, explore new flavors, save money, and reduce waste. Kelvin helps to unlock the advantages of home coffee roasting for even the most novice coffee drinker.

Try new types of beans, styles, and intensities of roasts. And blend them.

Kelvin is the first home coffee roasting system that also provides a curated selection of green coffee beans delivered straight to you. By putting the entire process into your hands, you have the control and range to experiment with multiple bean origins, roasting times, blends, and flavors to experience a new side of coffee from first crack to French roast.

Save money. Unroasted beans are often half the price of craft roasted beans. Unroasted beans also stay fresh for months, while roasted coffee can lose its flavor in days. No more trashing stale beans. No more wasting money.

With Kelvin, fresh green beans are brought directly to you, without the costs of professional roasting and handling. This leads to significant savings that helps Kelvin pay for itself in less than a year.

Kelvin is for everybody; designed for the first-time explorer to the seasoned do-it-yourself coffee aficionado. It’s now easy for everyone to experiment and discover the amazing complexity of craft coffee with set-and-go, perfectly roasted beans at any time of the day.

Roast with confidence —We’ve engineered Kelvin to roast and bring out the best quality from any raw coffee beans, using a vortex-drive bottom-up air roasting technique that will lead to a more even roast — so your cup is delicious no matter how you brew.

Roast for a pot, or just a cup —The ideal batch size for Kelvin is 100-120g of green coffee beans— enough to brew about 4-6 cups of coffee— so you can roast just enough for your morning pour over or for a whole pot. This flexibility enables you to make fresh coffee for any occasion, and all in under 10 minutes.

Unlimited outcomes — Set the roasting time by simply turning the control knob, push to start, and Kelvin does the rest. You can also add or remove time mid-roast, to make it easier to personalize your flavor. Combine different beans from around the world with varying roasting times, and the flavor possibilities are endless.

Roasting to different levels allows for coffee beans to express different qualities, based on how lightly or darkly they’re roasted. It’s easy to uncover each variety’s range of flavors by experimenting with small batches.

Simple cleanup —Collecting chaff is no hassle with Kelvin’s built in filter. It easily slips into the roasting chamber, capturing chaff efficiently and in one place. Bonus—you can even compost chaff for an eco-friendly cleanup.

Click here to Buy Now: $229.00 ~~$329.00~~

UPDATE: less than 72 hours left on their campaign!

A majority of the occupations we humans carry out are human-centric… and almost everything designers do revolves around human interaction and emotion; and while most products we design today have evolved from physical to digital, there’s always one key binding factor. The user… and the user hasn’t physically changed much (or even at all) in the past century, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. Because design as a practice inhibits human evolution i.e., it changes circumstances so that we, without changing the way we are, can achieve the great feats.

Back in the 70s, Henry Dreyfuss (the designer of the iconic circular Honeywell thermostat that inspired the Nest) realized the importance of human ergonomic data in designing for humans. He then embarked on a mission to capture human proportions at a scale never done before. The result? A definitive guide to human anthropometry, for both men and women of all ages, sizes, and walks of life. This data (more than 60,000 pieces of information) found its way into the original Humanscale book, printed from the 70s to the 80s. They changed the face of Industrial Design, ushering in the age of human-centric design (probably the only way to design good products). However, the MIT Press stopped printing these guides in the 80s, and they became collectibles and antiques, rather than becoming a staple in every designer’s collection. We clearly see the lack of incorporating human factors into designs today, with the most talked-about example being the smartphone, that chose to grow bigger, while human hands remained the same size. There’s a reason people still strongly feel the iPhone 5 was the best smartphone to use and handle.

Chancing upon one of the last prints of the Humanscale from the 90s, the designers at IA Collaborative decided to pitch a reprint of these manuals that contained data so exhaustive, nothing close to a manual this detailed has ever been printed since. “The applications are almost endless,” says Westra, IA’s design engineering lead. “We use them for everything from medical devices to appliances to sporting goods to watches to consumer electronics.”

The reprints will be exact copies of the original featuring the same data (which hasn’t changed since). Bundled into 3 books and 9 beautiful selector charts that lay out data with the simple rotation of a wheel (in a way these books and charts were designed keeping in mind the very factors they contain), these reprints will be available at a mere fraction of the cost of the originals (which you can find for roughly $2,000 on Ebay). The series of books and charts can be bought independently for $79 or in a complete collection for just $199.

The reprints of the Humanscale base themselves completely on the original, using the same printing material and quality, and retaining more than 60,000 pieces of data measured out in the 70s. Perfect for industrial design, interior design, transportation, and almost any design field that bases itself on human proportions (yes, app design too), the Humanscale is a must-have in every designer’s collection of books, not to mention design studios and schools. IA Collaborative aims to digitize the data too in a way that’s just as easy and accessible as opening a book or rotating a selector chart wheel. Their aim is to make the information accessible to designer practitioners, learners, and educators world-wide… because the best designs consider the people who are using them.

BUY NOW: $199.00 ~~$250.00~~