Yogi

Yogi began as a response to the way college students struggle to maintain consistent cooking habits around changing schedules, shared kitchens, limited storage, and planning fatigue.

The goal was not just to make another lunchbox, but to create a system that could support cooking from raw ingredients with less time pressure and fewer barriers to follow-through.

Research focused on student routines, shared cooking spaces, meal planning behavior, cleanup burden, food waste, and the moment where a planned meal becomes too inconvenient.

Key insights pointed toward flexibility: students needed a way to cook around interrupted schedules, avoid complex prep, and reduce the number of decisions required before eating.

The system pairs a modular portable cooker with a companion app. The product supports cooking from raw ingredients, while the app helps manage recipes, ingredients, timing, and cooking status.

This allowed the concept to address both sides of the problem: the physical difficulty of cooking and the cognitive load of planning what to cook.

My role focused heavily on CAD and physical form development, exploring how the cooker could feel compact enough for student life while still communicating enough capacity and reliability to cook a real meal.

I also contributed to design requirement framing, prototype evaluation, and UI/UX polishing so the physical product and app felt like one connected system.

The final concept gives students a way to prepare meals with less dependence on shared kitchens and less pressure to cook at one exact time. It supports flexible routines while still encouraging intentional cooking.

Yogi demonstrates product design, system thinking, research synthesis, physical prototyping, and digital interface development within a single connected experience.