We recognized the fact that though people like to take technology with them into the kitchen while cooking, they are worried about having to interact with it while their hands are messy or when they are working with other cooking material(s) that could leave stains or spill on the surface. People try to work around this issue if they can, otherwise, they just resign to the fact that they cannot look at the recipe while in the process of preparing it. We saw this as a key breakdown in their cooking experience and so, came up with interaction techniques that did not require them to use their hands.

1. Audio input: The users could use a list of pre-determined voice commands to navigate through the website. This reduces a lot of visual back-and-forth and movement, as the user no longer has to look at the website or stand in front of it to interact with it. Also, having predetermined voice commands ensures that the system understands the user correctly.
But one possible limitation is that there could be a lot of background noise during the cooking process and it might interfere with this interaction technique.

2. Keyboard gestures: This is a novel interaction technique that tries to address the above limitation. The user can interact with the keyboard using his/her elbows. Some of the gestures we considered were -

• a single elbow press indicating desire to play a video or go to the next step (depending on the context of the press event)

• "reverse swipe" and "forward swipe" of the elbow indicating desire to go back to the previous step or to go forward to the next step

• a "double elbow" hit indicating desire to pause on the current step

A more detailed view of these interactions can be seen in the demo video here.