Tag Archives: community living

Introducing Your New Kitchen Buddy To Help And Accompany You Through Your Cooking Time

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In the fast-paced world of today, where time is a precious commodity, the desire to cook wholesome meals at home often takes a backseat. Many millennials express the wish to cook more frequently, but their busy lifestyles and lack of culinary expertise frequently obstruct their path. The availability of pre-prepared convenience foods and the allure of dining out as a social experience often leaves little motivation to change one’s cooking habits. However, a revolutionary solution is on the horizon: Chao, an AI-powered social cooking platform designed to minimize the hassle of meal planning and eliminate the uncertainty of cooking, making the experience more accessible and enjoyable.

Designer: Tom Shirley (Cambridge Consultants)

Chao recognizes the struggle that many millennials face when attempting to embrace home cooking. The product acknowledges that the pain points of cooking commence long before one even steps foot in the kitchen. As someone who lived through the trials of university life, I can personally relate to this challenge. The lack of culinary instincts and the tedious, often boring nature of cooking made it difficult to muster the motivation to prepare meals at home, especially when you’re a student on a budget. Chao’s mission is to change this narrative.

Chao is not just another recipe app; it’s a comprehensive solution that redefines home cooking in the modern era. Here are some key features that make Chao unique:

1. Machine Vision:

Chao employs intelligent machine vision to ensure the correct usage of all utensils, making it the perfect companion for novice cooks.

2. Social Collaboration:

Chao fosters user interaction, promoting social collaboration around a common goal – preparing and enjoying delicious meals together.

3. Remote Participation:

Chao breaks geographical boundaries, allowing users from all corners of the globe to actively participate in the creation of meals, thereby creating a global culinary community.

Chao has been meticulously designed to address the genuine concerns of its target users. The team behind this innovation took the time to understand and empathize with users, pinpointing and resolving key pain points to ensure that the final product seamlessly integrates into their daily lives. Co-creating the concept with users at various stages of development ensured that the user experience (UX) and feature set remained perfectly aligned with their needs and expectations.

How Chao Works

Chao simplifies the entire cooking process with a seamless user experience:

1. Planning: Chao recommends tailored recipes. Once a recipe is selected, the necessary ingredients are ordered and delivered right to your door, saving you the hassle of grocery shopping.

2. Prep: Chao divides the preparation into manageable tasks, whether for one person or a group, offering advice and time management tips.

3. Cooking: The AI chef utilizes computer vision and various sensors to provide context-based advice, making it easy to tackle advanced cooking techniques in a fun and approachable way.

4. Eat & Enjoy: Chao helps capture and share meal times and dinner parties with friends and family, turning every meal into a memorable experience.

Chao guides users through the cooking process, sharing their progress and key statistics on a dedicated social media platform. With a deep understanding of user behavior, Chao provides easy-to-follow recipe steps along with tailored tips, thereby eliminating the uncertainty that often plagues home cooking.

Chao seamlessly blends the physical and digital worlds of cooking. The charging dock also serves as a home for the physical components of the system, seamlessly fitting into the kitchen environment.

A collaborative approach played a pivotal role in bringing Chao to life. Designers worked hand-in-hand with software engineers, electronic experts, and culinary enthusiasts. They tackled technical challenges such as person identification through computer vision, constructing a robust cloud-based infrastructure, and tracking utensils, whether actively or passively tagged.

In conclusion, Chao represents a pivotal step towards redefining the way we cook at home. It empowers millennials and anyone with a desire to cook healthier, more delicious meals, providing a solution to the time and knowledge constraints that often get in the way. With its innovative features and user-centric design, Chao promises to make home cooking more accessible, enjoyable, and social. It’s a product that’s not just about food; it’s about creating experiences and memories around the dinner table.

The post Introducing Your New Kitchen Buddy To Help And Accompany You Through Your Cooking Time first appeared on Yanko Design.

This vertical farming system was designed to build up community and accommodate the urban lifestyle!

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Urban farming takes different shapes in different cities. Some cities can accommodate thriving backyard gardens for produce, some take to hydroponics for growing plants, and then some might keep their gardens on rooftops. In Malmö, small-scale farming initiatives are growing in size and Jacob Alm Andersson has designed his own vertical farming system called Nivå, directly inspired by his community and the local narratives of Malmö’s urban farmers.

Through interviews, Andersson learned that most farmers in Malmö began farming after feeling inspired by their neighbors, who also grew their own produce. Noticing the cyclical nature of community farming, Andersson set out to create a more focused space where that cyclical inspiration could flourish and where younger generations could learn about city farming along with the importance of sustainability.

Speaking more to this, Andersson notes, “People need to feel able and motivated to grow food. A communal solution where neighbors can share ideas, inspire and help one another is one way to introduce spaces that will create long-lasting motivation to grow food.”

Since most cities have limited space available, Andersson had to get creative in designing his small-scale urban farming system in Malmö. He found that for an urban farm to be successful in Malmö, the design had to be adaptable and operable on a vertical plane– it all came down to the build of Nivå.

Inspired by the local architecture of Malmö, Andersson constructed each system by stacking steel beams together to create shelves and then reinforced those with wooden beams, providing plenty of stability. Deciding against the use of screws, Nivå’s deep, heat-treated pine planters latch onto the steel beams using a hook and latch method. Ultimately, Nivå’s final form is a type of urban farming workstation, even including a center workbench ideal for activities like chopping produce or pruning crops.

Designer: Jacob Alm Andersson

Following interviews with local residents, Andersson set out to create a farming system that works for the city’s green-thumb community.

Taking inspiration from community gardens and the local residents’ needs, Andersson found communal inspiration in Malmö.

Backyard and patio gardens are popular options for those living in cities who’d still like to have their very own gardening space.

Noticing the cyclical nature of community farms, Andersson knew that would be the crux of his design.

Following multiple ideations, Nivå ultimately assumes the form of a farming workstation.

Deep, voluminous soil pots provide plenty of room for growth and the high shelves allow vertical growing methods to persist.

Circling back to the community’s initial narrative, Nivå is a farming workstation solution that allows communities’ residents to farm together.

This tiny home in the Community First! Village is built for previously unhoused individuals

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Beginning in 1998, a mobile food truck based in Austin, Texas, with the help of thousands of volunteers, has helped serve food to unhoused individuals seven days a week and 365 days a year. That food truck has since transformed into Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a social outreach ministry responsible for the development of “the most talked-about neighborhood” in Austin, Texas, Community First! Village. The village is one of MLF’s three core programs that were started to serve the unhoused population of Austin, Texas, and offers permanent and sustainable housing for an affordable price in a mutually supportive community.

Teaming up with Bailey Eliot Construction, McKinney York Architects, an architecture firm based in Austin, recently designed and constructed a micro-home for one of the residents of Community First! Village. In order to meet the new homeowner’s tiny housing criteria, McKinney York Architects planned to design a micro house that met both the homeowner’s requirements for privacy and the village’s commitment to community support. The home’s final design incorporates a butterfly roof, which implements the use of a central valley where the two pitched roofs meet to collect rainwater for further irrigation use. Additionally, installing a butterfly roof allows for plenty of natural lighting to enter through the windows without having an impact on the homeowner’s privacy.

Taking full advantage of the 200 square foot area limit for each micro-home, McKinney York Architects also installed a screened-in sunroom for the homeowner to have the option of either opening the screens up to the rest of the community or keeping them closed for optimal privacy. Inside the home, original pine timber lines the walls, giving the feel of a blank canvas for the homeowner to leave as is or design as they’d like. The tiny home manages to include a bedroom with room for a twin-sized or larger bed, a modest kitchen, a relatively spacious working area, dining space, and a cozy den for relaxing.

Community First! Village is a 51-acre development planned by MLF over the course of two phases which spanned over four years and has expanded to include a total of 500 tiny homes as well as community amenities such as gardens and behavioral healthcare facilities. In 2014, the first phase of Community First! Village commenced after Tiny Victories 1.0, a design competition in partnership with Mobile Loaves & Fishes and AIA Austin DesignVoice, invited firms to design sustainable, tiny housing solutions that take up no more than 200 square feet. Following the first phase, which culminated with a 27-acre master-planned community for the “chronically homeless” population of Central Texas, the village’s second phase kicked off in 2018. Today, Community First! Village offers permanent housing and encourages a safe, uplifting community space for more than 250 formerly unhoused individuals.

Designer: Mobile Loaves & Fishes, McKinney York Architects, and Bailey Eliot Construction