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Chef's Portmanteau

2009 / Product design / collaboration with Dane Pieri & Albert Song.

A chef's travel bag.
Stylish chef-inspired design.
Detachable knife bag.
First aid access. Modular compartments. Made for chefs.

Project brief

"Design a softgood (anything cut + sewn) for an 'eating' category." After deliberation, my team decided to make a softgood for professional chefs to transport his tools and express his pride and identity, as well as address the personal attachment with his tools.

Research

Our research helped us discover that chefs have a deep personal bond with their tools. One chef said that he'd rather go through the trouble of lugging his stuff to his Dad's for Sunday dinner than use someone else's steak knife. Throughout a chef's career, he will accumulate his own set of knives, and use them/treasure them. We wanted to help them facilitate this.

We also found that chefs not only transport knives with them, but carry all sorts of stuff from whisks, peelers, spatulas, to specialty items (i.e. if they were a baker: cookie cutters), dictionaries, spare underwear/socks, recipe journals, first aid kits...

Current solutions are mostly knife rolls which tore easily/weren't enough to fit all their stuff, as well as more specialized bags which aren't durable and don't address the chef's personal connection to his tools. Most chefs have resorted to using things like tackle boxes, which aren't intended for chef use. Thus we set off to solve this problem.


An example of a chef's inventory. (isolatediguana @ Flickr)

Development

Here are some snapshots from our development process, click through the gallery to see some of my process:
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Exploration of forms.


A concept for a chef's utility belt. Research shows that most chefs only use 1-2 knives concurrently. The cloth is for wiping knives, and acts as a fashion item.

A focus on improving current market solutions: knife rolls. The ones on the market now are too small and not durable enough.

A more thought out concept for a messenger bag which carries a cutting board that doubles as structural support. The design is inspired by a stove top, using stove knobs for buckles to open the bag, as well as a use of dining cloth red. However, the concept of storing a cutting board was scrapped as research showed that any board smaller than 15x20 was considered unusable by pro chefs.

Finally moving into the final concept. Took suggestions from chefs that they wanted quick access to their most frequently used knives/tools and first aid. Also, modular storage for the chef to customize his own arrangement.

Playing with integration of tightening straps so you could pick it up / carry from any side.

Form refinement.

We eventually settled on this separatable backpack. The removable component is a knife storage bag which attaches to the main bag via its tightening straps. The straps can also buckle together to allow the knife bag to hang somewhere for easy access.

Sewing the prototype by hand.
Next

Solution

At the end, we resolved a backpack for chefs that has two separatable bags (one for knives, one for other objects), with customizable compartments (two trays for the knife bag with modular clips, and velcroed dividers for the other bag), with a quick access first-aid kit and quick-access flap on the knife bag. Colors reference chef's white clothes, dining cloth red, and the black professional tools they use. The back padding references a grill, and the back straps reference cuffs.

We've received positive feedback from both the design community and the culinary community. This project was featured on WIRED, Core77, DesignCrave, The Awesomer, and DailyGrommet.




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