Flicka was a sponsored project that I executed during my master degree studies. Whirlpool came to our program with a short assignment in the spring of 2006 to put together a concept of how we could enhance their products in a 5 year timeframe. With such an open ask it was up to each one of us to define a situation / problem to build on top of. 

In my case I figured out after some quick observations that the existing oven interfaces were either too archaic and limited or tried to be extremely fancy by going digital but that at the end it was style with no substance.

I found two major issues: information visualization (Is difficult to tell whether the oven is ready or not) and content manipulation (things are hot in there...). For the first issue I developed an embedded GUI on the oven knobs that allows the user to set a desired temperature / time and displays the current state as well.

For the second issue (manipulation) I developed a series of hw sketches of remote tray manipulations through the use of a series of sensors in a glove. The end result was a gestural user interface that would read the user's arm position to pull out or push in the tray without direct physical contact.

This was a solo short project where I developed the concept, the UI architecture, the visual design, 3d modeling and hw sketches.