Meditations on well-designed things: the rice cooker

Given that we spend so much time these days doing digital things, and every commercial company seems intent on making its software as contrived and unpleasant to use as possible, while non commercial software is still generally in its infancy when it comes to people-focused design, i wanted to step away from the screen from a moment to talk about some other designs.

Because the truth is i am surrounded by things which are well designed, and while there are many attempts to ruin physical design as well as digital design, it’s so much easier to avoid these attempts. I could be perfectly happy using some good old software, and have that taken away from me because the operating itself doesn’t want me to run it any more. But i can buy some physical thing, and almost nothing can take that away from me. Only time.

What is design? Design is the realisation of the purpose underlying a thing. That purpose might be contrived or evolved. That thing might be physical, digital, or conceptual, it doesn’t matter. Design is that aspect that makes it fit for purpose.

Today, i want to discuss the rice cooker, which i wrote about before a long long time ago. Specifically the “old-style” rice cooker, which comes with a single button to control whether it is in cooking mode or warming mode. The rice cooker as a single item embodies my vision for healthy technological progress more than anything else i can think of right now.

What is a rice cooker? It’s a little pot for cooking rice. Of course, it doesn’t have to be little; you can find very big ones that restaurants use. It also doesn’t have to be for cooking rice, but i’ll get on to that. You plug your rice cooker in, add rice and water, and press the switch. Once your rice is cooked, it will automatically stop cooking the rice, instead simply keeping it warm.

How nice is that? Rice is not easy to cook, but the rice cooker makes it easy. The rice cooker inhabits a niche: it does something mundane, so that people don’t have to worry about it. That’s so considerate!

Furthermore, by inhabiting this niche, and being able to consistently solve a niche problem in perhaps the simplest way possible, the rice cooker gains a flexibility that a tool with less simplicity lacks. How does the rice cooker work? You add rice and water to the pot, and press the switch to start cook mode. The switch is held down magnetically, and while it’s down, the rice cooker provides a high heat to the pot. Then physics kicks in: while the rice is in water, and the water has not boiled, it ensures that the contents of the pot does not get hotter than a hundred degrees.

As soon as there is no more water left in the pot, the rice can start heating above a hundred, and the magnet loses its magnetism (this is called the metal’s curie point, named after Marie Curie’s less famous husband, Mr. Marie Curie). This breaks the circuit, prompting the rice cooker to engage warming mode. No computer is necessary for this to take place, and the rice cooker needs no knowledge of rice or how it cooks. It is up to the user to put in the appropriate amount of rice and water for their desired rice consistency.

That means there’s no reason we have to stick to using a rice cooker for cooking rice; we can use it as a general purpose cooking point that cooks thinks to a certain temperature, and then stops. I use mine to make stew, steamed bread, and porridge, and to fry onions or warm up wine in the winter. The simplicity means that it can adapt to many tasks.

The old style rice cooker, while lacking explicit options for multiple features, is so conceptually simple that it doesn’t need multiple features. The design is self explanatory, and further flexibility is limited only by the user’s ingenuity.