By Ellen Sturm Niz

What if your toaster could print the morning’s news on toast? Or your cookbook logged in your groceries and told you what you need for each recipe? Could you imagine a laundry hamper that cleans your clothes with the click of a mouse? Entrants in the sixth annual Electrolux Design Lab competition have come up with these wild concepts and more, showing us an interesting future for today’s traditional household appliances.

Electrolux Design Lab, established in 2003, is an annual global design competition open to undergraduate and graduate industrial design students who are invited to present truly innovative, forward-looking, daring ideas and solutions for home appliances. The competition targets the upper-age segment of the Internet Generation (ages 25 to 35), which is comprised of brand-conscious, busy young professionals who are independent and concerned about the environment, and whose lives are intertwined with technology and online social networks.

This year’s challenge: Design tomorrow’s home appliances for the Internet generation—appliances that must be possible two to three years in the future and address food storage, cooking and/or washing. The main criteria were the originality of the concept; loyalty to Electrolux brand values of bold, expressive, intuitive and thoughtful; the creativeness of the design; consumer insight into whether it is really needed and wanted; and the degree to which the concept reflects such iGeneration core interests and concerns as mobility, convenience, time, materials, personalization, entertaining, technology and sustainability.

This year, more than 600 industrial design students from 49 countries submitted ideas. Electrolux narrowed the field to these nine finalists:

Coox
Coox, the adaptive cooking table, lets users cook and eat wherever they are in the house, alone or with guests, and becomes an extension of the dinner table, coffee table or desk, depending on the situation. “I think that flexibility is a very important theme for such a diverse and complex generation,” said the appliance’s creator, Antoine Lebrun, a design student at L’Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique in France. “Even though it’s easy to describe this generation, everyone has very different needs. That’s why my concept doesn’t impose one way of doing things but offers a maximum of possibilities for people to integrate it into their own lifestyles.”

The height of the appliance adjusts to adapt to its placement in the room. It cooks with induction technology, which allows the three-burner glass ceramic cooking surface to cool down immediately after the cooking process stops. There is also a warming area on one corner to keep food warm after cooking.

Drawer Kitchen
For people who live in front of their computers in tiny flats, Drawer Kitchen—which combines an eating surface, fridge, hot plate and dish drawer in about the same space as a filing cabinet—could be the solution. “I got the idea from looking at the small living spaces in Tokyo and at how much time people spend at their desks when they are at home,” explained the Drawer Kitchen’s creator, Nojae Park, a design student at Chiba University, near Tokyo. “A lot of people live in one-room flats. They go out early in the morning and come back late at night and rarely eat a meal in the house. If they do, it’ll be a simple one.”

Park points out that the Internet is a main point of contact with the world for the Internet generation: “They find information, keep up with their friends, order food, make reservations and many other things through the Internet. And they don’t want to move while they are at their monitor, but at the same time, they are hungry. So they want to solve their hunger problem near their computer desk.”

E-bag
The longer the walk, the cooler the refreshment at the end, thanks to E-bag, a handbag whose kinetic energy-powered cooling system gets its power from being swung back and forth as its owner walks. “I wanted to make a point about the way urban life goes with increased energy consumption,” said the E-bag’s creator, Apor Püspöki, a product design student at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design in Budapest.

The E-bag has a rotating handle attached to a dynamo that charges a storage battery via arm motion. The cooling system uses Peltier technology, a kind of solid-state heat pump that transfers heat from one side of the device to the other side. Cooling status is indicated by three LED lights. The capacity of the bag is approximately three liters.

Flatshare
There are all kinds of conflicts between roommates, but with Flatshare—the modular fridge solution for shared living spaces—at least you won’t have to deal with someone else’s smelly science experiment in your fridge. For creator Stefan Buchberger, a design student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, the idea grew out of a semester-long theme about keeping personal space clean and tidy. “I decided to create Flatshare fridge because there is nothing more disgusting than a dirty fridge in a shared flat,” he said. “At the time, I was living in such a flat!”

The fridge consists of a base station and up to four stackable modules. The modules allow each individual user to have his or her own refrigerator space and can be customized with various colorful skins as well as with add-ons like a bottle opener or a whiteboard. Handles on the sides of the modules make them easy to transport. “If you move to a new flat, you can just transport your module like a suitcase and hook it up to the base station in your new flat,” Buchberger explained.

iBasket
Tired of carrying baskets of laundry back and forth? The see-through iBasket stores dirty clothes and automatically washes them when it fills up. The wireless, remote-controlled appliance can be monitored via a personal computer. “As a member of the Internet generation myself, the inspiration for this came from everyday life,” said the appliance’s creator, Guopeng Liang, a design student at Tongji University in China. “We are busy working for our dreams and don’t have a lot of time to take care of clothes, nor do we like to.”

“But today, people store their clothes in a laundry hamper until it fills up, then carry the basket to the laundry room, wash them, come back, take them out, throw them back into the hamper, carry them to a clothesline and then hang them out. I believe that iBasket offers a much more convenient alternative.”

Scan Toaster
People who don’t have time to wait for bread to toast can take their toaster to work, hook it up to their computer as a printer with Scan Toaster, a USB toaster that prints news, weather and snapshots onto slices of toast. “I got the idea from looking at my scanner and printer beside my computer,” explained the Scan Toaster’s creator, Sung Bae Chang, a design student at Sejong University in South Korea. “I was chatting with my friends and suddenly thought, ‘How about scanning to a piece of toasting bread?’ and then started to brainstorm the idea.”

“So I researched the Internet generation and found that they like new things that are fun and interesting. I feel that my concept fits into that by giving them news articles or snapshots on their toast.”

Sook
Sook, a wireless kitchen assistant concept, brings social networking into the kitchen by generating, displaying and sharing recipes. “In my research, I found that 97 percent of the iGeneration owns a computer and 75 percent are on Facebook or other social networking sites,” said the device’s creator, Adam Brodowski, a design student at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. “I also found that they are all hypertaskers who do multiple things all at once. Eating dinner, text messaging, doing homework and watching TV are all strung together. They are also very comfortable with technology and the Internet. They run personal blogs, surf the web all day long, email back and forth and so on. Most importantly, they enjoy creating content to fuel the web and be noticed.”

Sook uses a series of sensors to detect what food is on, or near, its cutting board. In addition to measuring weight and moisture, Sook also has an electronic tongue that digitizes tastes and analyzes them so that the ingredients can be combined in a pleasing way. Each item is added to a recipe being built on the screen. As a recipe is being generated or used, the user can rearrange it, add spices, start timers and look up ingredients. When preparation is completed, the unit can photograph the dish and upload it, along with the recipe, to a social networking site for others to use. The entire unit is waterproof so it can be washed in the sink like a plate.

Stratosphere
Someday, instead of tossing clothes on the floor or over the back of a chair when you plan to wear them again, you could have them deodorized and disinfected by Stratosphere. “Members of the Internet Generation don’t throw their favorite sweater or trousers into the laundry if they’re not dirty yet,” observed the Stratosphere’s creator, Attila Sáfráni, a product design student at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design in Budapest. “They tend to hang them over the back of a chair to wear again. They don’t put the effort into folding them up and putting them away.”

That’s where Stratosphere comes in. “It’s actually a valet that sucks germs and micropollutants—like the chemicals of body odor and cigarette smoke—out of the clothes. The polluted air goes through a HEPA filter and then a chamber that disinfects it with ultraviolet light,” he explains.

Vesta
Sinks and cooktops take up a lot of space in small kitchens, but the Vesta induction cooktop folds flat against the wall and out of the way when not in use to provide a larger working area. “I was inspired by the fact that there are a lot of young, busy professionals in the Internet generation,” said the appliance’s creator, Matthias Pinkert, a design student at the HTW University of Applied Sciences, in Dresden, Germany. “They often live in small flats with fitted kitchens where the working area for food preparation is limited. But you don’t always need a cooktop, so Vesta folds away vertically when not in use. It also contains a scanner that can read RFID chips, which are predicted to replace barcodes on product packages. These chips could contain information about cooking times and temperatures and even recipe suggestions. So, Vesta saves space, time and provides more comfort for the Internet generation.”

Pinkert says the sleek design of the stainless-steel and glass appliance was inspired by the work of the Castiglioni brothers, who emphasized simple shapes. “They also brought articles from everyday life into new contexts, sometimes with good humor and irony, like the tractor-seat stool Mezzadro and the bicycle-seat chair Sella, for example.”

Visit YouTube.com/Electrolux Design Lab to see video of the appliances.

At the finals on October 8 and 9, 2008, in Zurich, first, second and third place winners will be chosen from the nine finalists. An international jury will judge entries based on intuitive design, innovation and consumer insight. Electrolux has named four internationally recognized experts to its Design Lab jury: fuseproject founder Yves Béhar; Axis FormLAB design director Jiao Mo; senior design manager for Nokia Younghee Jung; and senior VP of global design at Electrolux Henrik Otto. The winner will receive approximately $7,000 and a six-month internship at one of the Electrolux global design centers. The second prize is approximately $4,400 and third prize is approximately $3000. Visit Electrolux.com/DesignLab to vote for your favorite and check back on www.kbbonline.com for the winners.