Kitchens haven't changed much in the past 40 years. Think about it: Aside from primarily cosmetic bells and whistles like digital readouts on ovens and refrigerators, the microwave oven was the last big addition to the culinary arsenal. And that was back in the 1970s. Numerous attempts to bring the internet to the kitchen have been unsuccessful. No consumer seems to agree with manufacturers who have tried and failed to innovate kitchen design.
Rob Tannen, director of research and interface design, and Mathieu Turpault, director of design at
Bresslergroup, are actively trying to figure out how high tech can improve the kitchen in a way that consumers will love. Turpault was surprised to find out the small role that end user input figured into the kitchen of the future. "A lot of appliance makers are fishing for ways to make connectivity relevant, but they've approached the problem from a technological standpoint, so their solution is to slap a touch screen on the refrigerator door."
Bresslergroup is a growing product design firm that works with major manufacturers like Black & Decker, GE, Dewalt, and Bosch, and designs medical products as well as consumer appliances. The Philadelphia company, in business for 40 years, has launched what it calls Kitchen 2.0, a research project that aims to advance three areas of kitchen design: Eco, Technology and Modularity. The results of the research are available on a
webinar.
"The biggest changes in the kitchen have been architectural," says Tannen, who points to the popularity of the kitchen island. To get to the world of Kitchen 2.0, Bresslergroup did a sort of anthroplogical study, examining the smallest components of workflow, activities and social habits in both urban apartments and suburban homes. They came up with the MySpice smartphone app, now in the planning stages, which interfaces with a camera that sends pictures of the inside of the fridge for viewing at the store. They conceived of a modular storage unit that doubles as a dishwasher and can be loaded from the dining room. "The end product of this is the ideas," says Tannen of the Kitchen 2.0 project, which he terms an exercise in design thinking. The company is headed in the right direction, experiencing steady growth for the past five years, and now on the lookout to fill two open positions, a user interface designer and a design manager, to join the team headquartered at The Marketplace Design Center in Center City.
Source: Rob Tannen, Mathieu Turpault, Bresslergroup
Writer: Sue Spolan