Imagining a Better Coffee Maker
I received a new coffee maker for my birthday. Even though it's very nice, top of the line, it still leaves me wondering if there isn't room for improvement. This post will be a brainstorm with that end in mind.
Given the design of our home, the natural place for a coffee maker is beneath our kitchen cabinets. Consequently, making coffee invariably entails filling up the carafe with water, sliding the coffee maker out from underneath the cabinets, pouring the water out of the carafe and into the maker and sliding the coffee maker back under the cabinets.
I wish there were some sort of removable reservior, one I could easily remove and fill with water. A successful design would eliminate all of the previous steps except for the step involving filling some container with water. Given that our cabinetry is standard construction, I'm willing to bet others contend with the same issues. I suppose I might be able to use the sprayer attached to the kitchen sink, but the idea really doesn't appeal to me.
A friend of mine related his wish for more products and appliances able to sync their times according to the atomic clock signal broadcast through the airwaves. Given how cheap today's self-setting travel alarms are, I can't imagine it would too expensive to include this technology in my ideal coffee maker. Why set devices that can set themselves?
Stepping back from the problem a bit, the biggest reason manufacturers seem to be including clocks in coffee makers is so that people can program to them have their coffee brewed and waiting for them at a certain time in the morning. I feel this is where there may be the greatest room for improvement. Why mess with trying to program times at all?
If I load my coffee maker up with water and reload the coffee grounds at night (say before midnight), but I don't brew any coffee, you can infer with virtually perfect accuracy that I want my coffee brewed in the morning. Why else would I load it in the evening? It should be trivial to build a coffee maker that knows the answer to the "Was the coffee maker filled with water the night before?" question.
Next, we're left with the question of what time I want my coffee. I think the easiest answer is simply a button on the coffee maker that's pressed to indicate when you would have liked to have had your coffee ready, as in a "Coffee now!" button.
Equipped with this "Coffee now!" button, the ideal coffee maker would necessarily be wrong the first day (it wouldn't do anything), but it would learn to do the right thing in a short time. Pressing the "Coffee now!" button would influence its next attempt to make coffee at the right time.
If I were to attack the problem in real life, I'd probably just have the machine keep track of a learned time for each day of the week. This would probably be sufficient to handle a variety of work schedules including the most common Monday-Friday work week.
Accommodating those of us who sleep in longer on weekends would be trivial. In such cases, the coffee would have been made too early. Pressing the "Coffee now!" button once would be sufficient to adjust the times. Hardly stuff that requires neural networks or Markov models. Pretty simple logic should do.
Anyhow. In summary, my ideal coffee maker. It's easier to fill with water. It knows when it's been filled with coffee and water. It knows how to set its own internal clock automatically. You press the "Coffee Time!" button and it learns to make coffee that's ready when you want it.
Given the design of our home, the natural place for a coffee maker is beneath our kitchen cabinets. Consequently, making coffee invariably entails filling up the carafe with water, sliding the coffee maker out from underneath the cabinets, pouring the water out of the carafe and into the maker and sliding the coffee maker back under the cabinets.
I wish there were some sort of removable reservior, one I could easily remove and fill with water. A successful design would eliminate all of the previous steps except for the step involving filling some container with water. Given that our cabinetry is standard construction, I'm willing to bet others contend with the same issues. I suppose I might be able to use the sprayer attached to the kitchen sink, but the idea really doesn't appeal to me.
A friend of mine related his wish for more products and appliances able to sync their times according to the atomic clock signal broadcast through the airwaves. Given how cheap today's self-setting travel alarms are, I can't imagine it would too expensive to include this technology in my ideal coffee maker. Why set devices that can set themselves?
Stepping back from the problem a bit, the biggest reason manufacturers seem to be including clocks in coffee makers is so that people can program to them have their coffee brewed and waiting for them at a certain time in the morning. I feel this is where there may be the greatest room for improvement. Why mess with trying to program times at all?
If I load my coffee maker up with water and reload the coffee grounds at night (say before midnight), but I don't brew any coffee, you can infer with virtually perfect accuracy that I want my coffee brewed in the morning. Why else would I load it in the evening? It should be trivial to build a coffee maker that knows the answer to the "Was the coffee maker filled with water the night before?" question.
Next, we're left with the question of what time I want my coffee. I think the easiest answer is simply a button on the coffee maker that's pressed to indicate when you would have liked to have had your coffee ready, as in a "Coffee now!" button.
Equipped with this "Coffee now!" button, the ideal coffee maker would necessarily be wrong the first day (it wouldn't do anything), but it would learn to do the right thing in a short time. Pressing the "Coffee now!" button would influence its next attempt to make coffee at the right time.
If I were to attack the problem in real life, I'd probably just have the machine keep track of a learned time for each day of the week. This would probably be sufficient to handle a variety of work schedules including the most common Monday-Friday work week.
Accommodating those of us who sleep in longer on weekends would be trivial. In such cases, the coffee would have been made too early. Pressing the "Coffee now!" button once would be sufficient to adjust the times. Hardly stuff that requires neural networks or Markov models. Pretty simple logic should do.
Anyhow. In summary, my ideal coffee maker. It's easier to fill with water. It knows when it's been filled with coffee and water. It knows how to set its own internal clock automatically. You press the "Coffee Time!" button and it learns to make coffee that's ready when you want it.
posted by metamerist at
11:29 PM
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