Here at Dovetailed we spend a lot of time thinking about what we’ll be eating. Sometimes we’re thinking about the food we’ll be eating tonight (Pigeon two ways with Fondant potato, Celeriac puree and oven crisp kale, if you’re interested). Sometimes we thinking about the food we’ll eat tomorrow, but what about the food we’ll be eating in 5, 10 or 15 years? And what about how we’ll prepare and eat that? Now we’re salivating like Pavlov’s dog, dreaming of future food and future tech!
Ikea and IDEO recently ran a project with Design students from Lund University. They were looking at exactly the question of ‘How will we behave around food in 2025’. They provide a series of concepts for our food-centric habits in the future. Using emerging trends for home delivery they proposal a new short term food storage system. It will be interesting to see if people really do give up their fridges and return to a pantry. It would require an on demand, little and often approach to buying food, something increasingly offered by services such as HelloFresh and Gousto.
Thinking about the increasing capacity for ‘Internet of Things’ connectability they propose a smart dining table. The table acts as a Tangible User Interface (TUI) allowing you to place foods onto it and see nutritional information and other data appear on the surface. This idea is a popular one among the creators of technology, Whirlpool showed their smart cooking interface ‘Kitchen of the Future 2.0’ at CES 2015. Allowing you to get your Gran to guide you through cooking family favourites straight from the hob.
The idea of the table (or indeed cooker) as screen is not all that modern; MetaDesk was developed at MIT in 1997. The system they devised allows projected maps to be physically interacted with on a tabletop. So if we’ve been able to do it for so long, why is it not something for sale in John Lewis? The answer to this question is the most interesting material we get to work with at Dovetailed - human behaviour.
Often new technologies allow us to make things happen before we really understand how to behave around them. MIITO is a clever way of reimagining a technology firming engrained in our everyday behaviours. It uses a free standing heating element to boil water, it’s a super slim and elegant reimagining of the kettle.
Being experts in both User Experience and Industrial Design we are constantly imagining new ways of enjoying food. We’d love to hear from you about what new food technology you’re dreaming of using (and what tasty creations you want to make!). Follow us on Twitter for all the latest news on the nūfood kitchen robot, allowing you to 3D print amazing flavours straight onto any dish at home.