ONDO Cooking Thermometer

I would always encourage industrial designers to have a personal project outside work. The reason is, working in the consumer hardware industry, more than half of the ID projects (and they are under the confidentiality agreement) you worked on are likely to end up in an archived folder somewhere in a company's hard drive, and never get out to the eyes of public. I have reluctantly left many great projects and concepts behind for that reason. That's why I highly suggest, if you are not burnt out from your current work, starting scribbling your concept sketches and great ideas, which are entirely yours, on your sketchbook.

ONDO, Cooking Thermometer, was one of the projects I self-initiated in 2013-2014 when everyone was talking about making Bluetooth connected devices. There were a lot of speakers back then but not many were looking into the cookware industry. This project has an interesting story. Back in 2010, when we lived in Denmark, Nicolai, who is a BBQ fanatic, was soldering a little PCB board together to make his own personal Bluetooth enabled BBQ thermometer. This was a quick mock up he put together but I remember it actually worked quite well. Nicolai was telling me if I could make a nice design around this PCB assembly so that we can manufacture and sell it on the market. I was busy designing a smartphone back then and making a product for BBQ was the last thing on my mind. In a year or two, someone came up with the exact same concept and we saw a couple of very techy BBQ thermometers on the market.

I started my own consulting business some years ago and wanted to do something on my own beside working for clients. I thought about what Nicolai asked me a few years ago about the BBQ thermometer. It was not a cutting edge invention but I thought it would be a fantastic idea to make a product that's very techy into something that reflects our lifestyle. A hardware + lifestyle concept was starting to get noticed a couple years ago but it was still an unique idea around the years I worked on ONDO. Using wood was definitely challenging for a consumer electronic, but look what we have today, with speakers, phones, and USB chargers made with fabric, wood, and ceramics. I was not the only one, who was thinking about this after all.

The ONDO device has two-layers, the wooden outer shell and the inner plastic PCB housing. They are bolted together from inside so that there is a room for the wood to expand. The metal strip in the middle has a few LED lights underneath and a light guide for diffusing the light evenly. The LED progress bar indicates how far the meat is getting cooked. A halfway means it's done 50% relative to your goal temperature you set up initially. The bar is in sync with the associated app that comes with the device. I have always believed that ID should have the same look and feel, and consistency to the design of the app.

I see a lot of great apps nowadays but back then, many were not very well-designed, not intuitive, and overly complicated. There were many unnecessary features that you might use once but never go back to. I believe in a product that does one thing really well instead of doing multiple things okay. I wasn't sure why apps make you go into another screen and another screen to set up one simple thing. I'm quite impatient and I believe so are many others, I would like to open the app and expect that I can figure it out in a few minutes. Of course, the minimum setup is important but with ONDO, the main features are all set on a home screen, where you can change everything without going into a setup. The features include changing from Celcius to Farenheit by long-pressing the degree icon, setting up the goal temperature by moving up and down the tab along the thermometer measure, selecting a meat type by pulling down the tap and swiping sideways. The other BBQ thermometer apps had more options for different cooking styles and meat types, which I felt too overwhelming and they weren't customized enough to fit the need of all types of recipes. If you want a special recipe, it's probably faster to search for the right temperature on the internet and use it in the ONDO app. How simple is that.

I had a couple of collaborators in Silicon Valley to help out with electronic design and software design. Below is the demo of the prototype we created for the ONDO app. It was still the first stage of testing, but I can see with a few tweaks and refinements, this can be finished into a nice, simple, and user-friendly app.

I spoke with a few Angel investors in the area to see if anyone was interested in funding. I didn't know if I was lucky or unlucky, the ONDO project got halted since I became too busy with the other opportunities that came with the hardware boom in 2013-14 when many software companies have started working on physical products and needed industrial designers more than ever.

It is funny that I have worked on many 'cooler' projects like smartphones, speakers, and smartwatches but this is "the project" that everyone, whom I shared my portfolio with, liked the most and wished it was available in the market. If there is someone out there, who are willing to bring this into production and to the market, shoot me an email and I will be happy to collaborate.

Greetings in Japanese

いよいよベイエリアも本格的に秋めいてきました。今年の夏は果たしてあったのかなかったのか........という感覚です。今回は、昔、自身で手がけたプロジェクト、ONDOについて紹介したいと思います。ローマ字にするとキャッチーに聞こえるプロダクト名に、ん？と思う方もいると思いますが、その名の通り、アプリと一緒に使えるクッキングサモミター（温度計？）です。

機械製品という概念から少し離れて、ライフスタイルのアイテムの一つとしてデザインをできないかと、あまり一般的でない木材の使用を試みました。サモミターとアプリが統一されたデザインにもなっています。興味のある方は上のデモをご覧ください。

コンフィデンシアリティーがとても厳しいテクビジネスの中で、いくつものデザインコンセプトが会社の政治的な理由でキャンセルになり、ポートフォリオに入れられなかったなんて経験は工業デザイナーとしてはよくあるとことです。そういうことも考えて始めたプロジェクトですが、一時は本気でマスプロダクションまでやっていこうと頑張っていました。当時、シリコンバレーはハードウェアーブームで、私自身もその波に乗って忙しくなり、プロトタイプのステージで終わってしまいました。ONDOは意外にも反響が良く、なぜ商品化しないのかとよく聞かれます。もしONDOの商品化しに興味がある方がいらしたら、ぜひご連絡ください。