Reflection Statement

While cooking our pizza we learned that using one arm wasn’t as difficult as we thought it would be but rather the process just took longer. All the tasks were manageable with one arm but we had to get a little creative in order to complete them. For example, we had to use our teeth to open the box and set the plates down on the bottom of the sink to wash them. After going through this process and working on the various design process concepts in class, we realized that our topic of cooking pizza may have been too specific. We evaluated our struggles with cooking the pizza and decided to take a step back and focus on a broader range of meal preparation and other kitchen activities. From our research, we also discovered a few things about the market for amputee kitchen products. First off, while researching other various alternatives currently on the market, we found that the alternatives were extremely expensive compared to a regular product. For example, a cutting board designed with spikes to hold food typically exceeds $50. Another big struggle while cooking the pizza was all about stability. Every step along the way posed stability issues: from opening the box, to cutting the pizza, and even cleaning the dishes was difficult because there was no way to keep the objects steady with just one arm. Lastly, we found that the process of cooking the pizza was very time consuming. Even when we experimented with the frozen pizza, the process took us much longer with one hand than it would have been with two. We later discussed how even more time consuming it would be if the meal preparation included cutting vegetables, opening jars, or carrying a heavy pan. From our shadow research we found that there are a number of daily kitchen activities that would be much more inconvenient and time-consuming as an amputee, which has opened the door to a variety of design opportunities for us.