IKEA has commissioned a report with The Future Laboratory to explore what the kitchen of the future could potentially look like. This reactive environment takes advantage of a number of sensor-based technologies designed to help users make more sustainable and healthy decisions around food, from EEG-based readers tuned to individual brainwaves to intelligent virtual chefs that deliver recipe recommendations. The Future Laboratory explains in a press release below:
In thirty years time, the kitchen will be so technologically advanced that it will almost be alive, responding actively to our needs like only a mother could. To reflect this IKEA has created an image of the future kitchen – INTUITIV. As you walk into the INTUITIV kitchen of the future, LED light projections adjust to your mood – it will know if you have a hangover via sensors that will read your brainwaves. Aromatherapy infused walls will be synced to your calendar, calming you before a big meeting or energising you before a gym session. The fridge will have selected some breakfast options, identifying the essential vitamins for your day via sensors. When you get home, a hologrammed chef will be on hand for recipe inspiration. This kitchen will be intelligent, predicting its inhabitants’ needs with smart technology. Synchronized appliances will make everything happen at the touch of a button, communicating through iPad style devices which will act as the brain of the kitchen, making our lives easier.
The concepts described extrapolate on technologies in development and emerging today – so while the above will all certainly possible on a technical level, we find it important to consider how technological developments actually unfold within technosocial and sociocultural realities. Designers working to develop systems like those that know whether you have a hangover based on your brainwaves have to consider to what extent the individual benefit of having that information (the kitchen serves you a bloody mary, perhaps?) outweighs the social implications of having that information collected (do I want my home to know I’ve been drinking so much, and potentially share that with my friends and family?).
Or consider the classic example of the refrigerator that knows when you’re low on milk, so it can order it from the supermarket and have it delivered. The technical aspect of these kinds of systems are relatively easy problems to solve; the difficult design questions are those of how to give people the level of control they need to feel they have over devices, that lets them determine when/why/how their fridge talks to the supermarket. These are questions that will continue to be raised, inspired by projects like INTUITIV that give them a focus point, as home environments continue to become interconnected with the rise of sensor-based technologies and the Internet of things.
[via Electripig]
