The use of principles tectonics, faktura and construction in designing pancakes cooking set

Published in

UX Planet

10 min readJan 28, 2019

The pancake recipe and the volume of the dough bowl determine the height of the dish lid for the pancakes. The ladle comes to the bowl as the key to the keyhole. The bowl tells you when it is time to turn or remove the pancakes, and the pancake dish says what they should look like and how to fold correctly when serving

Sometimes I cook pancakes for breakfast. Not so regularly, but it happens. And there are long breaks between them, so I often forget the recipe, the technique and the details. This prompted the idea: what if there was a set for making pancakes, thought out for usability? The article below is just about the design of such a set, using the methods of constructivists: tectonics, faktura and construction.

Tectonics

Let’s start with tectonics. This is the principle of pulling out signs that correspond to the properties of targets. We wrote about this in previous articles (“Lost Half of Design” and “Signs and Properties”).

We want a sufficient number of delicious pancakes, which will be eaten for breakfast without residue. Signs of this great beautiful goal:

a sufficient amount — affects the amount of dough and the original ingredients. Plus, if there is still a filling, then the recipe is affected.
pancakes should be delicious — this is a recipe for the dough and a frying technique. Indirectly, the table serving also affects the taste: beautiful, with what we eat, wash down with tea.
no residue — everyone ate a whole amount of pancakes, no bits. That is, take into account the weight and size characteristics of the pancake relative to the number of eaters.

Divide this global goal into local, in stages: prepare the dough, fry the pancakes, serve to the table. Each of them has its own signs.

Ready dough: taste, density, no lumps, does not stick to the pan
Frying pancakes: the color and condition of the pancake, frying time, preparing the pan, maintaining the temperature
Serving to the table: how the pancake folded, whether it is oiled, what is more delicious

The Dough

How to pull out the dough signs at the beginning of the process? Taste, for example, can be described. We can define the thickness through the hole in the base of the ladle, on which we pour the dough and see if the dough flows through it. This means that there are no lumps and the fluid is viscous enough to pass through this small hole. But, of course, the fundamental in the dough — this is a recipe.

We know how many eaters will be at the table (five, say). Four pancakes for each, for example. So we need a recipe in terms of 20 pancakes. Plus, this recipe should be somewhere close at hand when I came to the kitchen. And what was at hand when I was going to make pancakes in the morning, came to the kitchen, took out a bowl for dough and reached into the fridge? That’s right, this is a dough bowl.

The recipe for cooking pancakes should be placed on the outside of the bowl.

This recipe should contain ingredients based on the number of pancakes for one person. If you want more, take more products. We need the dough for 20 pancakes, but not half a liter of dough.

You can also place the recipes of these pancakes with the filling. Then you need to specify that the filling requires specific products per pancake.

It will be great to mark this visually, in addition to the text. Icons or pictures of milk, eggs, flour, etc. It will be very helpful in the early morning when you really don’t want to read letters. Plus it will make the design more universal — there is no problem in what language to write a recipe and whether people can read.

To prevent the dough from sticking to the pan, you can add vegetable oil or melted butter in its recipe. Add salt and sugar to taste.

This we pulled to the beginning the signs of the first local goal — dough for pancakes.

Frying pancake

Photos of the finished pancake can be placed at the bottom of the dish for serving pancakes. Immediately we will see what should be the result.

A more effective solution is to make the pan cover dull brown to match the color of the perfect pancake. Then it will be easier to navigate: the pancake merges with the pan — remove. Then we have an image of the final result (signs of a goal) and the place where this result is achieved are combined. The question is only to the technology of manufacturers of cast iron pans can this be done.

Regarding the time of frying. You can navigate on a pancake — it should not gloss when it is turned over. This is also on the bowl, next to the recipe, as the easiest solution.

If you really want to, you can design a timer at the base of the bowl: when the bowl rises, the timer is reset. As soon as the bowl is placed on the table, the countdown of the time for turning the pancake turns on. The timer turns on exactly at the target time that the pancake needs to lie on the pan. Here tectonics is the maximum value of frying time on one side / before turning.

Preservation of temperature:

recommendation to pre-heat the pan on the bowl, next to the recipe. Then you will not have “the first pancake is always lumpy” (like “the first step is always troublesome” in English)
the recommendation that it is necessary to pour oil on the pan as soon as they put the previous pancake (so that it is heated) — also on the bowl, next to the recipe
orientation to the timer in the bowl and the pan temperature indicator (see “construction” below)

Table serving

When serving pancakes, you can roll it up nicely with a roll, envelope or triangle. All these schemes can be placed on the lid of the pancake dish.

Faktura

Recall that faktura is a change of the signs of an object (goals, in a particular case), in accordance with a change in their properties.

For the most part, all signs related to the faktura are indicators. They show the level, status, progress, time (elapsed or remaining — not important). Anything that changes in dynamics can almost certainly be attributed to faktura.

The standard sign of temperature in a pan is a temperature indicator, but I did not see it in cast iron frying pans, unfortunately. Moreover, note that the faktura will be the color (!) of the indicator, and not the indicator itself.

Faktura in a transparent bottle with sunflower oil, which we pour the pan before each pancake, is the level of this oil in the bottle.

For pancake dish with a lid, the texture will be the height of the stack of pancakes, which grows as you fry.

When kneading the dough, we will get faktura — decreasing level of dough in a bowl.

Closer to the end of frying, the dough in the bowl is less and it is on the bottom. It is inconvenient to get it, and shaving the ladle along the bottom is noisy, especially if not everyone is awake. That is, the property of the dough bowl has changed to “almost empty”. From here you can suggest the following changes:

For the convenience of collecting the dough from the bottom, you must be able to tilt the bowl and not hold it.

At the bottom of the bowl, you can make a detent that keeps it in a tilted state.

A similar solution, which allows tilting, but not fixing in a tilted state, has already been implemented in Joseph Joseph Tilt bowls.

Bowl “Tilt” for kneading dough with tilt and finger hole

This is a vivid example of how the faktura (volume of dough) determines the design of the bowl.

Construction

For simplicity, in this article, the construction will be considered unchanging features in the system. With a certain level of assumption, it is enough for us.

Dough bowl

In the dough bowl inside you need marks, showing the amount of dough from the recipe specified outside, for every 10 pancakes (maybe sudden guests will come to you for breakfast and you will need more). The marks here are more for self-checking and reminding how much we originally planned to do if during the frying process we forgot about it.

The hole for the finger to hold the bowl and the detent on the bottom to tilt the bowl when the dough will be finished — these are the elements of the construction of the bowl.

A timer built into the bottom of the bowl is also a construction.

The ladle

The diameter of the pan affects the number of pancakes. The volume of the ladle, which we pour the dough into the pan should be sufficient to fill the entire surface at once. Hence the conclusion:

The volume of one pancake according to the recipe should fit into the pan and into the ladle, which we pour the dough

This is a sign of the goal, permeating all elements of the system. It binds them into a single structure.

The shape of the ladle must correspond to the shape of the bowl in order to remove the dough as fully as possible with one motion.

As mentioned above, at the base of the ladle’s handle, near its container, you can make a hole to check the density of the dough.

An inquisitive reader will ask: “But what about the hole in the handle of the ladle, for which it hangs?”. Yes, we remember about it. But it occurs when the ladle interacts with the dish holder/crochet. In this article, we limit ourselves to a set for cooking pancakes and not the whole kitchen.

The pan

The diameter of the pan comes from the recipe and set items. It is from the recipe that we understand what exactly 20 pancakes will turn out. Accordingly, for one pancake, this amount of needed dough, scooped by the ladle. And so that it is cooked for the estimated time (you still remember about the timer in the bowl?), at a given temperature (and about the indicator in the pan, also remember, yes?) and it turned out to be a pancake of a given height (and the height of the pancake dish lid here, this below) need a pan of just such a diameter.

By the way, if we make for children, then smaller pancakes are needed. And here is a contradiction. There are pans on one pancake, and there are for several. How to be? Let’s make it compatible. Why don’t the producers make one pan (regular, cast-iron), and in addition — round grid with round holes? It looks like a picture, but the upper part is removable.

Ideally, if we immediately consider that the proportions in the recipe for adults and for children should be divided by the number of cells for children’s pancakes. That is, the dough recipe for 20 adult pancakes (20 pans) is, for example, 25 children’s pans. Let’s leave from a variant when the dough remains for just one children’s pancake.

Pancake dish

The diameter of the pancake dish should be larger than the diameter of the pancake (and the pan). And if we design to the end, then the dish can be made so that the pancakes were hot as long as possible:

thick walls and bottom to keep warm
high edges of the base so that the oil does not leak out on the tablecloth
the height of the lid is determined by the stack of finished pancakes. And it, in turn, is determined by the amount of dough in the bowl and the recipe for the dough.
a tight lid with a voluminous handle so that it does not slip out of the oil hands

Such dishes already exist. Here is an example:

Oil bottle

The volume of oil poured into the pan before each pancake can be adjusted through the dispenser on the bottle (as sugar in a cafe), or use a spray gun, but only the spray sector must be smaller than the standard ones so that the oil does not get on the fire.

Conclusion

Thus, all the elements of the pancake set of dishes are logically interconnected into a strongly connected system. Buying such a set, you will immediately receive items that help each other and you make delicious pancakes for breakfast.

In a set for making pancakes also used a blender, a T-shaped dough dispenser, a pancake shovel and other items. Let’s leave their design beyond the scope of this article.

If you wish — you can take as a basis an intermediate (not ideal, and in Russian) version of the concept map (more detailed here) created during the process of writing this article and add a description of the set for pancakes. We are pleased to support your efforts.