Submissions for this year’s Electrolux Design Lab have begun to appear across the press, with the winners being announced on October 8th and 9th at the finals in Zurich.
Many entries in this competition – such as this soap nut using washing machine from last year- have been known to focus a great deal on eco-friendly designs that can help push forward electronic progress without a hefty toll on the environment; still, there are a few that are clearly just design for design’s sake. Nothing wrong with that!
This year’s brief, “home appliances for the Internet generation” covers food storage, cooking and washing. While most of the submissions are unlikely to ever be made (and if they are, certainly not in the form envisaged here), some of them are actually potentially useful and wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Back To The Future Part 2 kitchen scene.
My favourite for this year’s competition is Sook, a social networking recipe generator with an electronic ‘tongue’ that can ‘taste’ food in its vicinity and churn out recipes that use those ingredients. Perfect for those times when it seems that all you have left is an elderly lump of cheese, a can of tuna and half a tomato. Indeed it’s the current leader in the online vote.
You can take part in the voting by visiting the website above! (It’s an annoying Flash-type job with one constant URL and pop up windows, so I can’t link straight to the voting page. Flash is for losers, dummies!).
In second place is a toaster which scans for information such as weather reports and imprints it on your toast.
Yeah, not so much.