Innovation Sighting: Kitchen Ovens Using S.I.T.

As a teacher, it’s always rewarding to see my students create ideas that eventually make it into the marketplace. Here are some great innovations for the kitchen oven that a group of students created last year, January 2014. Later, we’ll compare these to the new innovations announced by Whirlpool at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show.
1. SIT Technique: Task Unification / Multiplication – “A range that is also your recipe”.
Description: A “smart” range provides you access to a database full of real-time digital cooking classes and assists with temperatures and timing to help you master complex recipes. Weight sensors ensure just the right ingredients are taken. Diabetic, healthy, authentic Indian and Italian modes (and countless others) help you master every style!  Think you have the chops to create a truly unique recipe? The Kitchen Coach also works in reverse, capturing and recording settings, ingredients, & portions that made your dish amazing. Share your success with your friends through social media, so they to can enjoy your meal
2. SIT Technique: Division – “Divide the control panel off the oven.” Attribute Dependency Change – “As your dinner circumstances change, your cooking mode changes.”
Description: The Masterchef Smart Remote equipped stove features a user interface  that can be removed entirely and conveniently relocated to anywhere in your home or kitchen, to help you keep watch of your dish’s vital statistics anywhere you are  The Masterchef Social Timer informs Entertainers as to gaps in heating and stirring, to facilitate chef mingling, and allows for oven settings to be defined by a moving-target meal time.
3. SIT Technique: Subtraction – “A range with no grates”
Description: An oven range with no grates or exposed conduits – a large flat surface like any other counter top that, unlike a glass-top oven, can also serve as a kitchen island or bar, even while in use.  Non demarcated range space allows for cooled storage bins to live under breaks in the Island’s low profile griddle top. No longer must the range top be a no-mans-land on your counter.  No longer must the chef toil tirelessly in the kitchen, alone, while the party keeps its distance.  Made for entertainers, this kitchen island-sized griddle top is divided into quadrants.  Use all 4 quadrants and you have a Benihana-style theater of stir-fry.
These are just a few of the many in the students’ Dream Catalog project for this course. Click to download the entire catalog.
Now let’s take a look at what industy giant, Whirlpool, announed at the 2015 CES, a full year after the students developed their ideas using SIT.

Congratulations to my students, Jared Gosnell, Dave Heyne, Qi Jiang, and Eva Lutz for innovating the future!