Badly-designed-stovetop converter

[This is inspired by thought in "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman.]

I'll bet you a dollar your stovetop sucks. If you paint the entire surface black so you can see no diagrams or letters, can you tell which knob corresponds to which burner?

I'll bet that you have 4 burners arranged in a square, and 4 controls in a vertical row down the side. Or maybe slightly better, 4 controls in a horizontal row across the front, hinting that the left two might operate the left two burners. If you don't take time to read the little diagram, you'll likely turn on the wrong burner. At least, I do. A lot.

A better layout would put the 4 burners in a trapezoid, with two burners close together in the back and two burners spread apart in the front; and a row of 4 controls arcoss the front of the stove. There's no way to confuse the controlo-burneral mapping even when you're holding a pot full of boiling water in one hand and keeping your eyes on the pan full of ground beef.

What we need is a converter that fits snugly over the badly-designed stovetop to move the burners and controls to correct locations. Use heat-retardant metal ducts to transfer heat from each burner to a new location 6 inches higher and offset as necessary. Use an amazing series of levers and gears to translate the turning and pressing of controls down to the old controls. For bonus points, the new controls swap between displaying C and F at the flick of a switch, so you can read recipes in either language.

The manufacturer could create a variation for every model of stove on the market, handling different control types and locations, and burner locations. For stoves that controls burners through an 11-button digital interface, the converter would need a small logic chip to translate all of this into a simple knob.

And we'd never again wait 10 minutes for the water to boil, only to notice that the burner next to the pot is glowing a bright, useless red.