When I thought about sounds that I rely on in the kitchen, the first thing came to my mind was my rice cooker. I realize that I rarely look at the screen of my rice cooker and heavily relies on the sound of it. In addition, the rice cooker often gives very inaccurate time estimates and sometimes it would take twice the time as it states, which discourages to look at the display even more.
Here is the p5js prototype.
It does still has the idea of a ‘bar graph’, but I was really trying to imitate how the rice change while during the cooking process. I played around with how the size of rice grows individually, and their arrangement and orientation.
Finally, I chose a constant number of rice throughout the ‘growing process’. Their x and y are almost done in perfect grids, but I added a little randomness to prevent individual rice from looking like rotating while maintaining the ‘uniform’ distribution.
I also wanted to show distinct different from the cooking states and done state, and I thought a background color change is more obvious/powerful than just the pattern change, especially when users are far away from the rice cooker.
