You might not have a robot in the kitchen, but you could soon surf the net from your sink. Trish Lorenz explores the unpredictable future of home appliances
With the benefit of hindsight, the future was a wonderful place. Apart from an obsession with bland décor, gleaming uber-hygenic floors and oddly uncomfortable furniture, post-war visions of future kitchens tantalised us with such perennial futurologist’s favourites as the magnetically levitated, induction-heated frying pan and the fridge in a drawer.
Behind the facade of the microwave (RGB Digital)
The Ideal Home Exhibition of 1956 predicted that the ‘House of Tomorrow’ would be atomic-powered. Food would be vacuum-packed in plastic bags and irradiated with gamma rays – no need for tedious refrigeration! The ‘Monsanto House of the Future’ – on display at Disneyland from 1957-67 – promised a plastic ultrasonic dishwasher for your plastic dishes.
Lives would be changed by Frigidaire’s fridge with motorised revolving shelves and, bizarrely, a built-in mixer. And in 1969, $10,000 could buy you the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, which could store recipes, tell you what to make with the ingredients you had and, for its pièce de resistance, balance your cheque book.
There has been real progress since then, of course – inventions such as microwave ovens and freezers, without which it is difficult to envisage contemporary life. These changes have come in response to consumer trends, particularly around our living habits, growing environmental awareness and ever-evolving internet and mobile technology.
The way we live is changing rapidly – and that has a big effect on the white goods we use. Official figures show that the percentage of European households occupied by one person rose from 18% in 2001 to 30% in 2008.
At the same time, notes Nina de Man of trend-watchers PitchWork, 30% of Europeans aged between 25 and 35 still live with their parents. Many others share flats until well into their thirties. By that age, previous generations had wed and started a family.
Lives are increasingly frenetic. Homes are shrinking as cities become congested. Even in the US, the median home was 8.7% smaller in the third quarter of 2008 than in the quarter before. “Increasingly,” de Man says, “we’re looking to maximise every second of the day by outsourcing recurrent tasks like household chores to technology.”
Marc Tanner, head of industrial design at the Industrial Design Consultancy, sees the squeeze on our time and space as polarising our personal lives. “Tasks like cooking can sometimes be functional – say, on a Monday evening after work – and other times fun, as when you have friends round for dinner on the weekend. Products are having to offer both automated one-button options and more complex features too.”
Panasonic introduced a microwave with a button marked ‘chaos’. Sadly, this option merely varies the power of defrosting rather than opening an inter-dimensional portal.
The pressures on our time mean we can now buy an oven that automatically decides on the most suitable cooking method, temperature and cooking time for your food, or a dishwasher that judges how much rinsing is needed. Appliances are taking up less space, too, from tiny dishwashers that fit in a drawer beside the sink to multifunction ovens that double as a microwave.
As functionality is rethought and updated, we are edging ever closer to those seemingly fantastical gadgets envisaged in days of yore. Husqvarna’s Automower (released last year) is a solar/electric hybrid robotic lawnmower. Owners simply lay out a boundary cable that tells it where to stop and it does the rest.
A decade ago, we tried to install a computer in every appliance. Not any more. Now, all the information you need is on the internet Gerd Wilsdorf, Siemens
JVC’s Everio camcorder enables one-button uploads to YouTube, ensuring recordings don’t exceed file-size limits and eliminating the need to time recordings or edit footage before uploading.
The Flatshare Fridge – the winning entry at Electrolux’s Design Lab 08 – consists of a base station and up to four stackable modules, allowing each individual to have their own refrigerator space. It can be locked or customised with colourful exterior designs, and has handles to make it easy to transport when moving.
Climate change is also driving the makeover of domestic appliances. Thomas Johansson, design director at Electrolux Major Appliances Europe, says: “Appliances account for about 20% of an average household’s energy consumption.”
Whether of their own volition or driven by consumer demand and regulatory pressure (as typified by eco-labelling schemes) manufacturers have smartened up their act.
The Automower, for example, has no exhaust emissions, uses roughly the same energy as a standard light bulb and is made from 90% recyclable material. V-Zug’s latest tumble drier uses heat-pump technology to recycle hot air back into its drum, making it 45% more efficient than conventional condenser technology.
“We estimate that in European homes alone, there are 188 million appliances that are more than 10 years old,” says Johansson. “Replacing them with more energy-efficient products would reduce CO2 emissions equal to those enerated by six million cars in one year.”
The switch to energy efficiency would do the profitability of Electrolux and its rivals no harm, but it would help even if, as James Woudhuysen notes, the gains to be accrued in this way are sometimes exaggerated.
Behind the facade of the microwave (RGB Digital)
Whirlpool – which designed the sleek, futuristic astronauts’ kitchen in 2001: A Space Odyssey – is going further by developing what it calls the ‘Green Kitchen.’ Taking a systematic view of the entire kitchen, the company aims to share water and power between appliances to minimise carbon footprint, maximise efficiency and reduce cost.
For example, a filter under a sink will detect clean waste-water (run-off while waiting for a tap to run hot or cold) and store it in a tank behind the fridge. The heat generated by the fridge’s motor will warm it to 40°C so it can be used by the dishwasher or washing machine without being heated again, saving both water and energy.
“We predict this type of system will save more than 70% of the energy that an A-class product uses today, which translates into an average saving of £355 a year per household,” says Alessandro Finetto, Whirlpool’s director of global consumer design. The first products in the range are expected to launch in 2010.
While manufacturers are starting to tackle eco issues, they haven’t truly exploited the benefits of internet and mobile technology. “To date, we’ve seen fairly naive attempts at linking the internet to appliances,” says Tanner. “Things like screens on your fridge and so on. Designers need to step back a bit; they can see it will happen but they haven’t done the thinking behind it yet.”
LG’s much-vaunted internet fridge has been followed by dishwashers and other appliances that do the surfing for you, but these are high-end products retailing for four figures, not everyday purchases.
Gerd Wilsdorf, head of design at Siemens, says integrating the internet will eventually become mainstream. “The internet will move into actual practice,” he says. “It’s about being able to do things like downloading recipes and following cooking instructions.”
Finetto agrees but believes that the first innovations will kill off complicated user manuals, with manufacturers sending instructions to mobile phones or providing web-based information instead. “A decade ago, we tried to install a computer in every appliance. Not any more. Now all the information you need is on the internet.”
Increasingly, we’re looking to maximise every second of the day by outsourcing recurrent tasks like household chores to technology Nina de Man, PitchWork
To see what’s really possible in this area, companies will consider engaging younger designers who have never known life without connectivity. Over the next few years, so-called iGeneration designers will graduate and may work with manufacturers to drive development.
At Design Lab 08, students from across the globe were invited to create appliance concepts. Among the most interesting ideas was the Sook, a wireless kitchen assistant that generates, displays and shares recipes – bringing social networking into the kitchen.
Sook uses sensors to detect what food is on its cutting board, weighs it and suggests recipes. As a recipe is generated, the user can rework it, adding ingredients or checking alternatives online. When the meal is cooked, Sook photographs it and uploads the image and recipe to the user’s chosen site.
“I found that 75% of the iGeneration are on social networking sites,” says its creator, Adam Brodowski, a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia.
“They are centred on creating and sharing internet content, and each person aims to be noticed for their creativity. My product lets them share recipes and experiences; it essentially lets them cook together.” Think Gordon Ramsay’s Cookalong Live with a computer rather than a stroppy chef.
Products with this level of technical sophistication may be a while away, but change is coming. “The general movement in the industry is to add value from an intelligence point of view, so you have less of a static machine and more an intelligent device,” says Finetto. “It’s not something that will tell you what to do but it will help you. It will adapt to you, rather than you adapting to it.”
So the multi-tasking, life-organising kitchen appliance may be much nearer than we think. But many users will be wary of becoming early adopters. The future sounds very beguiling but if you check out a website like www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk you find that users in the present are more intrigued by such issues as “my washing machine is slowly eating my clothes”.
From Sleeper to Scooba
It took 30 years to turn a sci-fi comedy into reality
In 1973, when Woody Allen pretended to be a robot in his classic futuristic comedy Sleeper, it was widely assumed such machines would soon be doing the chores in all our homes.
While robots have been put to use in the workplace, they have not transformed our kitchens.
Last year, the University of Munich revealed it had developed a new household robot that keeps track of the contents of your kitchen, learns simple tasks and “could be making you dinner while you relax”. Alas, users needed to plaster their kitchen with RFID tags.
Perhaps the best option might to be to emulate iRobot, a US firm which has been quietly automating individual tasks with products like the Scooba floor-washing robot, launched in 2006. Sales have been restricted by the £206 price tag.
Back to the future
James Woudhuysen says designers and manufacturers should sort out the basics before they get carried away by new technology.
“People rush to talk about smartness in white goods, but behind a washing machine you’ll find a little piece of plastic costing five pence, where the hose hooks in.
Think how many times you have to pull out a washing machine to see why it isn’t working: if they spent 25p instead of 5p they could solve half the hose problems that happen. Smartness? It would be smart to fix that.
There’s no function that tells me when the guarantee on a product is running out – I have to go to my paperwork for that.
Instead, you could get a code with your warranty to key in, and then when it’s almost running out you get a little reminder saying ‘renew your warranty’.
Does anybody do that? No. Does it cost much? No. Does everybody have trouble finding their warranties? Yes.
The way the discussion is going, though, is ‘you need smart metering to check your carbon footprint’. Carbon dioxide doesn’t come out of your kettle, it comes out of [Yorkshire coal plant] Drax B.
If you want to fix carbon dioxide, look at Drax B, look at carbon capture and storage, don’t finger-wag at consumers.
I want clean water, I want cheap energy, I don’t want climate change ignored – but as I argue in my book, Energise, if everyone switched their lights off at home, it would save 0.6% of carbon dioxide emissions from the UK.
If you try to minimise through metering the white goods-related emissions, it’s going to save 1-2% of UK emissions. It’s a joke.
What we need are quieter, more compact, more intrinsically efficient machines, with clearer displays that go a bit further than the internet fridge and all that carry-on.
The problem is manufacturers are not prepared to take risks with R&D. They don’t believe consumers are brainy enough for new features, and they’re obsessed with business models – rentals and warranty agreements.
So it’s not just the bottom line – it’s risk aversion coupled with what you might call financialisation. That leads to management being distracted from that fitting at the back.”
James Woudhuysen is professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University.
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 6, Summer 2009