Would you use Common Kitchen in your Kitchen?
Our friend Sam Guyer at Tufts sent us this link from the Sunday NY Times, about a new HP computer made for kitchen use. Both Noah and I were TAs for Sam, and he knows we like to hash through the implications of different applications.
The idea of a kitchen computer has been around for a while; I remember mid-’90s discussion of “internet appliances” which could be set up in the kitchen or elsewhere in the house; I think there may have been some faintly condescending implications about how computers were going to be so easy to use, even housewives could handle them. (This was clearly before someone noticed that the skill-set of a competent housewife overlaps closely with that of a CEO.)
HP seems to have really thought this one through, though. Rather than taking a computer, and finding some way to cram it into the kitchen, they’ve thought about what happens in the kitchen and built a computer to support that. My favorite feature: a touch-screen that can be cleaned off like a countertop. I could use one of those for the track-pad on my laptop, some days.
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