Dispelling fixed ideas with Irori Dining, a new, richer dining experience
Blue-sky thinking: How can we reimagine the dining experience as part of a richer way of living? One way is to focus not on a place or thing, like the kitchen, but on the activity of preparing and eating a meal. Eschewing the conventional bounds between disciplines, we gathered designers from a wide range of fields and held a workshop. The concept that emerged from that process is Irori Dining.
The concept is “preparing together and eating together.
Participating in this exercise were experts from the fields of product design, space design and user-interface (UI) design. Normally, the kitchens with which homes are furnished and the appliances arranged within them are designed and developed as discrete, individual projects. In this project, our aim was to create something entirely new, by breaking down the boundaries between those domains. The creative method adopted for this process was “acting out”: The designers used physical movement to generate ideas off-the-cuff, flesh them out, take them apart, and do it all over again. One after another, participants threw in ideas such as, “What if we turned a washitsu (Japanese-style room) into a kitchen?” or, “How about a kitchen that can be carried over to where everyone is?” then tried them out in the physical space. Amid that brainstorming process, one team decided to try putting the kitchen in the middle and gathering everyone around it, sharing the acts of cooking and eating.
What the team discovered was that, instead of preparing the food in the kitchen and eating it in the dining room, they could bring the acts of preparing and eating together, and in the process spawn a new locus of communication. The members realized that, by tearing down the boundaries between cooking and consuming, they could find what they were looking for: a place where people could gather with the focus on food. They had happened upon the concept of Irori Dining, from the Japanese irori, meaning “sunken hearth.
Turning the concept into reality
The product designers’ challenge: A sunken hearth for the modern world
The team decided to aim for an induction-heating (IH) cooker built into a dining table consisting of a single glass surface. For this purpose, an IH cooker using a glass tabletop more than twice the conventional size had to be storable flat within a counter. The frame that normally surrounds glass on the IH cooker was banished and the edge of the counter made as thin as possible, creating the appearance of a single glass tabletop. Normally, the heat exhaust is installed over the IH cooker, but this arrangement creates too much clutter for the flat-tabletop concept. Moreover, to create a table, space was needed under the countertop for people to put their feet. To address these issues, a heat-exhaust circuit was built into the unit, venting the heat from the sides at the bottom to create a gate-shaped IH table. This innovation highlights the advantages of creating appliances and furniture together. By trial and error, an IH table with a single glass countertop was created. The “modern sunken hearth” was complete.。
■ The product designers’ challenge: A sunken hearth for the modern world
The team decided to aim for an induction-heating (IH) cooker built into a dining table consisting of a single glass surface. For this purpose, an IH cooker using a glass tabletop more than twice the conventional size had to be storable flat within a counter. The frame that normally surrounds glass on the IH cooker was banished and the edge of the counter made as thin as possible, creating the appearance of a single glass tabletop. Normally, the heat exhaust is installed over the IH cooker, but this arrangement creates too much clutter for the flat-tabletop concept. Moreover, to create a table, space was needed under the countertop for people to put their feet. To address these issues, a heat-exhaust circuit was built into the unit, venting the heat from the sides at the bottom to create a gate-shaped IH table. This innovation highlights the advantages of creating appliances and furniture together. By trial and error, an IH table with a single glass countertop was created. The “modern sunken hearth” was complete.
■ The UI designers’ challenge: A trail-and-error search to bring people together
The UI designers began by placing a pot, a frying pan and so forth on top of a piece of paper the size of the actual countertop, to envision a scene of cooking interactively. Again and again, the designers confirmed the lines of movement to make sure cooking could be performed smoothly and easily. The designers judged that arranging the countertop so that people faced each other as they cooked would foster communication, keeping the conversation flowing. To maximize that experience, push-to-open touch panels, which would appear only when they needed to be operated, were installed on both sides of the countertop. This configuration achieved the goal of a design in which people could gather around the IH cooker, cooking and eating together.
■ The UI designers’ challenge: A trail-and-error search to bring people together
The UI designers began by placing a pot, a frying pan and so forth on top of a piece of paper the size of the actual countertop, to envision a scene of cooking interactively. Again and again, the designers confirmed the lines of movement to make sure cooking could be performed smoothly and easily. The designers judged that arranging the countertop so that people faced each other as they cooked would foster communication, keeping the conversation flowing. To maximize that experience, push-to-open touch panels, which would appear only when they needed to be operated, were installed on both sides of the countertop. This configuration achieved the goal of a design in which people could gather around the IH cooker, cooking and eating together.
■ The space designer’s challenge: Creating a new dining space
The goal of Irori Dining is to create a scene of people enjoying lively conversation as they eat together. One fly in the ointment was the noise generated by the exhaust fan. To address this problem, the team moved the source of the noise, the fan unit, from its customary place in the range hood to the building frame behind the ceiling. By rethinking the fixtures and the space as a whole, the designers achieved a new concept in home living: a kitchen that (apart from the conversation!) is as quiet as a library. As an added bonus, the new design slimmed the profile of the range hood ductwork, forming an appearance more suited to a place where people gather. A richer, livelier dining space was born, where people can converse easily on any occasion.。
■ The space designer’s challenge: Creating a new dining space
The goal of Irori Dining is to create a scene of people enjoying lively conversation as they eat together. One fly in the ointment was the noise generated by the exhaust fan. To address this problem, the team moved the source of the noise, the fan unit, from its customary place in the range hood to the building frame behind the ceiling. By rethinking the fixtures and the space as a whole, the designers achieved a new concept in home living: a kitchen that (apart from the conversation!) is as quiet as a library. As an added bonus, the new design slimmed the profile of the range hood ductwork, forming an appearance more suited to a place where people gather. A richer, livelier dining space was born, where people can converse easily on any occasion.
A vision for the future
Irori Dining knocks down the walls that separate the cooks from the diners. It’s a new, more relaxed and mutually supportive dining experience. The new possibilities for communication are endless. Imagine a nursing-care facility where the residents and caregiving staff cook and dine together, or tourists staying at a private home where hosts and guests enjoy preparing and eating local dishes as a single group of friends. Through the timeless experience of eating, we might even find solutions to some of the problems confronting society today. In a changing society, it makes sense to update our approach to living from time to time, unbeholden to fixed ideas.
