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A SMART TABLE that suggests recipes for leftover food and a “mindful” water system to make amateur chefs more aware of how they use the resource - this is the kitchen of the future as imagined by Ikea.
The Swedish flat-pack furniture chain asked London-based design company IDEO, together with students from two universities, to build a 2025 concept kitchen for a pop-up exhibit for the Milan expo.
The students spent months researching people’s attitudes and ideas about cooking and eating, and IDEO designers guided them as they built concept kitchen products,” the company said.
The designers based their concepts on the idea that kitchens would evolve to suit people’s changed living situations in the future, when it was predicted there would be more city-dwellers in smaller homes with near-instant food delivery shifting the way people shopped for and kept their groceries.
Here are a few highlights from the concept, which is heavy with Internet of Things gadgetry:
A “table for living” to get people to waste less food. Home cooks can place a food item on the work surface and, using a camera, it will identify what the ingredient is before recommending dishes, complete with cooking instructions. Irish-run startup Drop has already been selling similar technology with its smart kitchen scales.
A “thoughtful disposal system” to remind people what they’re throwing away by making them manually sort through material for recycling, which is then crushed, vacuum packed and labelled for collection.
A “mindful water system” to help people be more aware of their water usage. It has to be tipped from side-to-side to differentiate between toxic “black” water and “grey” water, which can be reused in a dishwasher or garden.
A “modern pantry” in which food is all on display, rather than hidden in the back of a cupboard, to get people to be more “inspired” to cook with what is on hand.
Ikea’s Gerry Dufrense told ZDNet the future kitchen would have computers and technology “everywhere”, but a key element would be “preserving the tactile creative pleasure” of the space.
Technology could easily make the space feel robotic and sterile, but this project was guided by the need to keep tech in the background.”
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Great idea with the food on show ikea..If you don’t have kids..or animals….or a husband ;-)
There won’t be much food on Greek tables when the kapilist swines crush their country in the next few weeks at the stroke of a pen
My kitchen is never that clean
Another “Internet of things” article full of useless and presumably expensive gadgets. Electronics manufacturers going all in thinking people ate going to replace perfectly good equipment with gimmicky rubbish like this and WiFi kettles. Sorry lads,not happening. Don’t need a computer to tell me what a tomato looks like. Next
The odd gem pops up from these 1000′s of mad ideas, so let them keep thinking them up. Apart from the WiFi kettle – they can dump that one alright.
I always tell the wifi to boil the kettle. She does feck all else!
There’s wifi plugs, which you could throw on anything you want, and power it on from anywhere. Be useful for the gas heating, the oven, a slow cooker… handy if you’re not sure what time you’d be home when you leave the house.
Try put one of those tables into a scullery
Can I have my flying car first, please? They were promised from about the mid-60s.
Oh God I’d love one of those!
In 2025, there will be articles about “Here’s what we thought kitchens would be like today – a look back 10 years”
We will all have a smug chuckle about how wrong we were
My kitchen has all mod cons. A manky microwave and a filthy cooker held together with grease. I know there mod cons cos it’s what the advert in the rental section said. It must b true.
Where is the star trek food replicator “tea earl grey hot”
Whatever happened to all those glass cups?
what dish is she making with broccoli, tomato and onion? i’m intrigued!
Don’t buy version 1. I’d wager you will be left with bugs (double meaning implied) and a million chopping knife marks
Disappointingly kitchen looks much the same, no space saving with table plonked in the middle, glass cabinets a simple solution to display food and what about the food capsule diet we were supposed to be facing in future years? would have hoped for more innovation.
agenda 21
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