Clear your kitchen benches - a design proposal for a wi fi/bluetooth tablet that does away with recipe books, shopping lists, guesswork, kitchen scales, anxiety about balanced meals and, possibly the telephone, has won its graduate designer an innovation award.
The ‘Smartscale’, is a social media-enabled indispensable kitchen helper and healthy eating coach rolled into a tough, slick digital tablet, designed by QUT industrial design graduate Alex King.
He says the aim of Smartscale is to help young Australians tackle home cooking.
"The Smartscale is a stainless steel tablet fitted with digital scales and two lightweight chopping boards that has its own recipe database and can also access any others on the net," Ms King said.
"I designed if for young people aged 20 to 29 who tend to eat out a lot and not always make the best food choices because they feel that cooking meals at home isn't convenient.
“The Smartscale takes care of food portion control, reduces food waste and has plenty of creative recipes to stimulate an appetite to cook at home.
"Users can personalise the Smartscale with their BMI, food allergies, vegetarian or gluten-free preferences as well as their pantry ingredients.
"A user can come home and decide to make dinner. They can gather the ingredients they have on hand, say chicken, chickpeas, and tomatoes and then ask the Smartscale to find recipes based on them.
"Now, if they put the chicken on the scale and find they have twice as much as they need, the scale can recalculate the recipe to maintain a balanced meal according to their BMI or recalculate to make two portions - one to freeze for another dinner or a portion for lunch.
"They can then get cooking accessing step-by-step instructions."
Ms King said Smartscale users can share their recipes or see friends' recipes.
"The Smartscale works in conjunction with smartphone applications giving the user access to the Smartscales' recipe database when out shopping so you can pick up what you need on the way home."
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