Kitchen & Bath | October 1, 20092 Comments

Electrolux Design Lab Winners

Electrolux has announced the winners of this year’s Design Lab Competition. The challenge asked industrial design students from around the world to send in their home appliance designs for the next 90 years (Electrolux is celebrating their 90th anniversary).

Here are this year’s winning designs.

Grand Prize: Cocoon Meat & Fish Cooker

Cocoon is a conceptual cooker designed by Rickard Hederstierna from Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden. It uses radio frequency identification (RFID) signals to identify muscle cells in meat and fish dishes and suggests cooking times. The idea is to “use science to create food, thereby decreasing the burden on the planet by reducing the need for intensive fishing and farming.”¬† The concept is to ‚Äúgrow‚Äù meat and fish from pre-packaged sachets, like making popcorn in a microwave. So you don’t actually catch the fish or raise the cow. Well, it looks cool, but I can’t stop thinking of Soylent Green.

Here are the other finalists.

Teleport Fridge

Beam me up, Scotty! Designed by Dulyawat Wongnawa, from  Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, The Teleport Fridge simply takes your order for food and teleports it directly to you, nice and fresh. It reverses the process by taking the leftovers and transporting them to the recycling center. I need this right now.

Flying In The Rain

From China, student Penghao Shan, Zhejiang, from Sci-tech University, comes a device that uses flying balls to catch rain water, purifies it and delivers it to the drinker. The homing tray also reads fingerprints to determine what additives should be added to the water to ensure the drinker optimizes his or her health.

Mol?©culaire

This concept was a little difficult for my tiny brain to understand. It’s a 3D molecular food printer. Designer, Nico Kl?ɬ§ber, from the K?Éln International School of Design, Germany, was influenced by chefs who scientifically experiment with food and food to create fresh ideas. The Mol?©culaire simplifies the cooking process and acts as a computer numerical control (CNC) food printer. It autonomously prepares basic and otherwise difficult-to-create two and three dimensional parts of meals. It works with a layer-by-layer printing process using small particles from diverse ingredients. This provides simplicity, accuracy, repeatability and, of course, great tasting food! Anyone who can explain this to me get a Design Hole T shirt.

Read on!

Le Petit Prince

From Czech Republic, Martin Miklica, of Brno University of Technology, brings us Le Petit Prince. It’s is a robotic greenhouse designed to facilitate the future exploration and population of Mars. Le Petit Prince takes care of a plant it carries inside its glass case, which is mounted on top of its four-legged pod. In search of nutrients to care for the plant, the robot is programmed to intuitively learn the optimal method for this process. It also reports its movements and progress to its fellow greenhouse robots via wireless communication so that they can learn from each other. Okay!

Renew

Renew “blasts” garments clean. An infrared scanner and radio frequency identification (RFID) gather information about a garment from specifically designed clothing tags. Slide the garment through the slot and the steamer does the rest. It’s as simple as that. Nice looking! It was designed by Louis Filosa of Purdue University in the USA.

Naturewash

Naturewash is a waterless washing machine that uses negative ions to wash nano-coated fabrics. Horizontal in shape, the washing machine has three touch screen settings: clean clothes, grass scent and flower scent. (What, no Febreze?!) A user can lie or sit on Naturewash to clean or refresh the clothes they are wearing. For a more thorough clean, clothes can be placed flat on the washer. This could be quite useful in a frat house. I wonder if that’s where designer, Zhenpeng Li, from Zhejiang University in China got the idea?

Bifoliate

Here we have a wall-mounted dishwasher. One side is the dishwasher. The other side stores them. Nifty! You don’t need to empty the washer. You wait until the dishes stored there are dirty and wash them. While they’re washing, you use the dishes on the other side. Designed by Toma Brundzaite from the Vilnius Academy of Art in Lithuania.

Time to vote! Which design would you most like to have. For me, it’s definitely the refrigerator. How about you?

Tags: design competitions, student competitions, student design