What if a kitchen worked more like an ensemble?
Professional kitchens rely on quick adaptation, subtle communication and embodied anticipation—yet they have historically been organized through hierarchical brigade structures.
Brigado examines how AI-supported tools might facilitate the improvisational coordination that kitchen work already demands, while making knowledge more shareable and creating room for less hierarchical, more inclusive working cultures.
Its guiding question is: How might AI-supported communication systems challenge rigid workplace hierarchies and enable safer, more equitable forms of collaboration in professional kitchens?
Knowledge, coordination, and accountability
The research and design concept explores hands-free, multilingual access to tasks, training and shared workplace knowledge, alongside questions of role, recognition, accountability and worker participation.
The underlying ambition is not to intensify labour through surveillance or optimization. It is to ask how a system might support the expertise, care and real-time collaboration workers already bring to the kitchen.
Currently building a minimum viable product (MVP).
Brigado is in early prototype and minimum viable product development. Work to date includes the initial concept, user research, workflow design, interface exploration and technical experimentation. The current web prototype explores interface and workflow ideas; hands-free multilingual assistance and wider workplace learning functions remain design directions rather than verified operational capabilities.
My contribution spans venture conception, research, product and interaction design, and early innovation development. The project advanced through the Mosaic Tech Accelerator for BIPOC Women Founders.