#HTE
A New Fire-to-Energy Device—But the UX May Need Some Help
As far as we’re concerned, BioLite has got the best products on the market for turning firewood into energy. That’s why we gave their BaseCamp stove a Core77 Design Award last year. BioLite’s cooking stoves improve combustion efficiency, reduce smoke and generate electricity—a triple win.
Now a sort of would-be partial competitor has emerged, or is attempting to, on Kickstarter. Have a look at this JikoPower Spark device:
We can’t consider the Spark a true competitor to a BioLite stove, as the former is an add-on device and the latter provides a complete solution. It’s possible that they can compete on price: The Spark is going for $115 on Kickstarter and a BioLite CampStove goes for $130. The price difference is negligible in developed nations, but admittedly might prove a dealbreaker in developing nations where $15 is a lot harder to come by.
One additional advantage the Spark has is that it can be “retrofit” to any situation where there’s already fire.
But in our eyes, the advantages stop there. The glaring drawback is that the Spark’s UX doesn’t look all that great. It obviously has to be placed quite close to the heat source, and propping it up on an uneven or elevated surface looks like a jury-rigged affair at best.
Spark’s industrial design, we feel, has a long way to go. While the developers produced a series of iterative prototypes, the final product still doesn’t look quite finished to us. We don’t mean that in a design-snob aesthetic sense; we mean in a functional, practical sense. The flat bottom and overall form just don’t seem like the best solution for being placed near a variety of heat sources.
Contrast that with the UX for any of BioLite’s stoves, where ease-of-use is paramount.
What do you think? Can a better design for the Spark make it a worthy competitor to BioLite, or do you think BioLite’s “whole package” design approach and well-thought-out UX means they’ve got the market stitched up?
http://www.core77.com/posts/57162/A-New-Fire-to-Energy-Device%E2%80%94But-the-UX-May-Need-Some-Help