The high-end appliance company Miele recently commissioned an interesting study about the kitchen of the future. It projected that in 50 years our food will be 3D-printed, walls in our homes will grow food, and we’ll even have mini-fish farms right in our kitchens. But you’d be forgiven for feeling like you’ve heard this all before. Specifically, from Martha Stewart back in 1996.
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The American kitchen has always been a battleground for competing visions of the future. But one of the most radical ideas for the kitchen of tomorrow wasn’t some Space Age design with all the bells and whistles — it was actually having no kitchen at all.
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When your microwave is sitting there glowing and spinning inside, do you ever wonder where all those stray rays of energy go? Turns out they usually just slip out the door, into thin air. But a Japanese scientists has found away to harness that power and use it to juice your other appliances.
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In 1964, sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov penned a piece for the New York Times with his predictions for the world of 2014. Looking at the World’s Fair of 50 years hence, Asimov imagined 3D TV, underground cities, and colonies on the moon. Many people online have hailed this as an incredible example of prescient thinking, but what sticks out to me is just how shockingly restrained—unoriginal, even—his predictions were for the time.
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Pre-dehydrated food processor? Non-functional sinks installed purely for style? A streamlined… baby? When it comes to midcentury visions of tomorrow, sometimes it’s hard to tell the spoofs from the earnest predictions. But what’s even more interesting is why the parodies popped up in the first place.
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Through modern eyes, most American cuisine in the 1950s may not seem like the most appetizing stuff. There was an abundance of strange meats, way too much jello, and hot dogs in just about everything (and vice versa). Sometimes the combination of the three made for a fascinatingly grotesque display. But while some of the food in 1950s cookbooks may look a little weird to those of us in the year 2013, as an inverse of the old joke goes, at least there were large portions.
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With populations growing and cities overcrowding, space-saving designs are amassing a huge, highly lucrative following. The only problem is that they often stay just that—designs. But after being unveiled at the recent Milan Furniture Fair, at least one innovative appliance is leaving concept land to become a reality: Ecooking, a fully functional, vertical kitchen. More »
At some point over the past year appliance makers began a design war to see who could come up with the most innovative and original range hood designs. And with its new retractable Pareo hood, Italy’s Faber has just made a strong push towards victory and bringing an end to that war of aesthetics. More »
The basic essentials for living under a roof with four adjacent walls are a constant. But it you live in a shoebox apartment, a dorm room, or a tiny studio, you have to make every little item count. Here are a handful of compact gifts that make a solid contribution to a happy home—and don’t take up a whole lot of room while they do it. More »
If preparing a bowl of Ramen Noodles maxes out your culinary capabilities, you might want to consider a trip to the Tokyo Institute of Technology to enhance your skillset in the kitchen. Researchers there have developed a cooking simulator complete with virtual vegetables that can actually burn, and a force feedback frying pan that lets you feel the weight of a hefty steak. More »
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