“When I can’t do it, I feel so helpless. But when I am able to cook, it’s the greatest reward, watching my family eat and knowing I was able to provide a balanced meal for them. It keeps me hopeful.”

-Judy Curry, as told to Arthritis Today

At Catalano Design, many of our staff would tell you that they love to cook, to eat what they cook, and the satisfaction they feel when they share something they’ve made with their friends and family. We imagine that there’s a better than good chance that you or someone you know very well loves to create meals for others. From a time likely long before recorded history, cooking and sharing meals has been a favorite social activity of human beings all over the world.

The knife is undoubtedly one of the quintessential cooking tools. Just about everyone in the world learns how to use some kind of knife to prepare or cook food, and to eat. You may think that it’s something you absorb the basics of once, and then using a knife doesn’t change for the rest of your life.

However, we invite you to realize that, for some people, the simple act of using a knife changes dramatically. Imagine that chopping an onion causes you so much pain that you are unable to do it again for several days. And, if you are a lover of cooking, several days without your knife can feel just short of forever.

For those suffering from arthritis, cooking can become an arduous task. Our job with knife maker client Dexter Russell was to discover, through interviews and observational research, how a better tool could alleviate some of the pain of preparing food. We found that many arthritis sufferers faced the dilemma of wanting to cook meals at home to maintain a healthy diet—which improved their chronic condition—but often suffered from too much pain, inflammation or debilitating flare ups to do the cutting, chopping, and other tasks required for their meal. Preparing and cooking their own meals resulted in eating more healthily and often allowed them to use less pain medication. Our goal was to give people a way to cut, slice, chop, and mince with less effort and wear and tear on their joints.

In our next post on this project, we’ll explain our user-centered research and how it helped us draw out the conclusions we needed to develop what eventually became the DuoGlide Knife line.