Building a kitchen

I work for an IT company designing and implementing software systems for large companies. The following was an analogy that I put together for one engagement to explain why the request we were asked for was not as simple as the customer expected. The work itself was to introduce a new point of sale application to their retail stores. The old system was a "green-screen" interface to an ancient main frame which was also used to manage their repairs centre.

"Our clients intend to renovate their kitchen. They have bought a set of modular units from Ikea and have hired us to put it in place in their house. Their existing kitchen has only the one row of cupboards with the bench-top and the fridge stuck in the corner. The new set of units contains a proper pantry, work-table and a set of drawers.

The project is currently at the stage of working out how the modules should be arranged in the space available so that it can be used the way that they intend. The trouble that we are running into is that they believe everything they need is “out of the box”. It is - mostly - but the box is a flat pack and the pieces need to be screwed together and fitted together in the most efficient layout. We have our screw-drivers and hex keys in hand but need to know which units go next to each other and what the most common activities in the kitchen will be. And plumbing and wiring were never going to be provided with the kitchen units.

For instance – we have been asked to make sure that there is a power outlet near the cutlery drawer. Fair enough, but why? So that it is not necessary to move around much while making a cup of coffee. It turns out that in the current kitchen the coffee is kept on the bench next to the kettle and the cups are in the cupboard underneath, while the teaspoons are across the room. The client believes that having power near the drawer will allow them to have all these things in one place. BUT – in the new kitchen, the cups will be in a cupboard above the bench and the coffee will be kept in the pantry.

If we follow the request to the letter, it will not solve the underlying problem. So we need to understand the *actual* requirement is not to have the power near the spoons but to make it easy to put together a cup of coffee without travelling all over the room. Extracting this requirement from what the customer *thinks* they want is the skill of the designer.

At the same time – we also need to take into account things that the customer doesn’t even think of. The pantry should be near the main entry point so that groceries don’t have to travel far, and the fridge should ideally be against an outside wall for energy efficiency reasons.

One of complications to all this is that our client has had everything laid out in the old kitchen in logical relation to how it is used. With only a single set of cupboards there is no logical grouping according to purpose, but grouping according to task. Hence food is kept next to the utensils used to prepare it and implements next to where they are used.

The off-the-shelf replacement has a completely different, though equally valid, justification for where everything is placed. And that layout is implicit in the structure of the cupboards such that altering will mean cutting and patching the packaged components.

There is also another issue is the customer has also been doing repair work on the kitchen table and keeping the tools and parts in the cupboards and drawers along with the cutlery and plates. Part of our job is therefore to put together a workshop - which should be, of course, in a separate room. I am expecting this separation to also cause some angst, and I am going to have to have some discussion with our team since the same modules (cupboards) will be used for the workshop as for the kitchen. Most of the tradesmen won’t understand why they need to kept as separate as I intend them to be."