Process - Early Development

Jackson Wu

In the very beginning of the process, we did a lot of research and brainstorming. The majority of the research we did was looking for precedents that provided a culinary experience through either performance, technology, or a bit of both. Seeing as our cart was going to be somewhere in between performance and technology, we had to have a firm grasp on how people and robots have made food in the past. Two of the robot precedents we looked at were Let's Pizza and a programmable robot chef. Both of these were a bit creepy for different reasons. The "Let's Pizza" was essentially a vending machine, so the food looked very mathematical and soulless. The robot chef made good food, but the kitchen had to set up in a exact way, and no one wants a robot with a knife swinging around their kitchen. This was when we realized that to make an automated falafel cart, we would have to deal with the uncanny valley. In other words, we would have to make sure the automation was advanced, but not so advanced as to be creepy. The brainstorming we did mainly focused on food carts and food trucks. We asked why would a person go to a food cart, what the problems with food carts were and how we would address these in our cart. We mapped the falafel process out after a live demonstration of how to make a falafel wrap. Then, we split into two groups: a group to focus on experience in favor of mechanics, and a group that used mechanics as the main attraction of their cart. The experience was the Falafoucel, and they had a rotating design, where their were chefs in the middle, and you ordered at one side. The FFFF focused on mechanics and was Their carts was a glass box with a nearly autonomous falafel machine inside. You would order at one side, sit in a chair, and the chair would move around a track, following the falafel.