Form without function revisited

The white goods company Electrolux has been running a lab design competition to come up with designs for domestic appliances for 2099 (apparently, in 2009 Electrolux was 90 years old). There were eight finalists who came up with various unlikely possibilities, of which the most fruit-cakey are the two I have included here.

I’m all in favour of designers being given a bit of free rein with creativity if they then refine to reality, but there seems to be a problem with the criteria used to select these designs. Two essentials are missing. Scientific practicality – would this be feasible in 90 years time? – and practical relevance. An obvious question to ask, surely, is who would want a domestic appliance that does this? Each of these ‘novel’ ideas falls down at one of these hurdles.

The first, shown at the top of the page, is a teleporting fridge. According to designer Dulyawat Wongnawa: Technologies seem to be progressing at an increasingly faster rate nowadays. In the next 90 years, we will see a lot of technologies that today we think are completely impossible. Even though my teleportation concept might sound far-fetched, scientists have already succeeded in teleporting small particles such as photons. So over the next 90 years, this technology will have time to develop and become part of our everyday lives.

Unfortunately there’s a disconnect of logic here. The same people who are teleporting photons are very clear that there is no prospect for teleporting an object like the apple used in the ‘demonstration’ of the fridge. I love the whole business of quantum teleportation – it’s one of the stars of my book The God Effect - but I’m really not convinced that it is going to be used to move food around 90 years from now. Note, by the way, that moving is all it does – so that ham that your fridge teleports would have had to be sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Sounds impractically complicated to me. Of course, back in 2009, I didn’t have supermarkets delivering food within an hour.

But at least the fridge is inspired by real science, and there’s a vague point. It would be kind of handy for your fridge to be able to summon up produce through the airwaves (though, to be honest, if I were designing it, I would have the items delivered into a closed fridge, rather than an open box). By comparison, the other design I want to highlight does something of magnificent pointlessness. It’s a greenhouse designed to roam around Mars, scouting for material to keep alive a single plant in the top of it.

Why? In what possible way would anyone want one of these for the kitchen? Designer Martin Miklica struggles to answer the question ‘What are the main consumer benefits of your product?’ with this magnificent piece of woffle: One thing you notice on Mars is the silence and serenity. That’s quite good for one week’s vacation in the countryside, but for modern people it’s very depressing to live in such a place for several months or years. Therefore, the main benefit of Le Petit Prince is that it’s not just a machine, but more like a pet or silent friend that you can speak to when you aren’t in the mood to talk to people. On top of that, it is a good gardener that grows any plant you want or need to bare [sic] life or just for its beauty.

Right. I’ll have two.

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