The Kitchen Of The Future

If you’ve been watching the current Phillipe Starck thingy on the box (Design For Life) you’ll know that designers … well … they can be a bit precious, a bit daft, and occasionally quite mad.

Some of the ideas pitched by the students beggar belief, but none of them can quite match the antic capers of Starck himself.

His account of evolution in the episode I caught was one of the funniest things I’ve seen on TV in ages: “To start wiz, we was bacteria! Zen feesh. Aftair, we become frog … Perhaps tomorrow I will jump on zis box and fly!”

I’m sure you will Phillipe, I’m sure you will.

Flights of fancy are at the heart of a rather more focussed design competition launched by Electrolux, the results of which were unveiled at 100% Design today.

The entrants were asked to design home appliances that will shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes over the next nine decades.

The winner was a cooker that will, err, ‘make’ meat and fish by heating up animal molecules. So there’ll be no need to go out and spear a salmon or kill a calf (can’t see Gordon Ramsay liking that one).

There’s also a fridge that will teleport food straight to its shelves (hmm, wonder where they got that idea from?) and a personal flying rainwater catcher based on a hummingbird.

No futuristic competition worth its salt would be complete without a product designed to appal Prince Charles – so step forward the washing machine that does something unspeakable with nano-technology and negative ions.

And last, but by no means least, let’s hear it for the bug-eyed mobile greenhouse designed to facilitate the future exploration and population of Mars (like we haven’t made a big enough mess of this planet…)