This modern refrigerator optimizes storage and organization with smart technology

The Aura refrigerator is a modern home appliance equipped with smart technology to optimize storage and use.

As we sink deeper into the world of technology, so do our homes and home appliances. Smart technology dictates most of the controls behind modern kitchen appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers, but their overall look has largely stayed in the past. Hoping to bring the refrigerator into the modern era by reshaping its structure and technical fittings to accommodate today’s smart technology and environmental needs, Aura is a new type of refrigerator. Designed by FUHUA Design Studio, the Aura refrigerator breaks down the conventional fridge into smaller compartments to allocate the energy used and minimize its impact.

Designer: FUHUA Design

The eggs and additional breakfast-ready food items can be found in one slide-out drawer, while the beers and other late-night beverages are reserved for a unique pull-out caddy. Describing the design choice behind breaking down the fridge into small compartments, FUHUA explains, “Dividing the door into smaller compartments allows users to have quick access to the frequently used items, thus reducing the energy waste by optimizing user behavior.”

Additionally, the refrigerator automatically turns its lights off when users aren’t around. Then, once someone enters the kitchen, Aura gradually illuminates its internal lighting to invite the users for something to drink and a bite to eat. Appearing like a genial cabinet, Aura is designed for optimal organization, allowing users to easily pull out food and drink items according to their designated compartment.

Without having to open the door, users will be able to see what’s inside the fridge thanks to the integrated backlight, “When approached by the user, the brightness increases as if AURA warmly greets them. At the same time, the soft back-light creates elegant silhouettes of the items inside on the translucent glass door, to remind the users what they have in the fridge without having to open the door.”

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This smart kitchen appliance replaces a busy control panel with a single interactive knob to easily weigh your food!

Hoto is a smart kitchen scale for the modern home that scales down its control panel to a single interactive knob and connects other Hoto users from across the world together via an accompanying social media channel.

Smart kitchen appliances have changed the game of cooking. With integrated social media channels, smartphone apps, and haptic sensors, smart technology catapults kitchen appliances into the future. From all-electric coffee brewers with built-in WiFi to Bluetooth-operated smart skillets, the limit does not exist for designers of modern kitchen appliances. Hoto, a smart kitchen scale designed by Lu Zheng, weaves together the best parts of smart technology including accompanied social media channels and interactive control panels.

The best home recipes usually have the most marked instructions, indicating every specificity to the half-ounce. To make sure we get the finished product on par with granny’s, kitchen scales come in handy. Guiding us through the weight of each ingredient, kitchen scales keep tabs on every ingredient in any given recipe and allow us to track what we consume on a daily basis.

Zheng’s smart kitchen scale, Hoto, is minimal by design, adorned with not much more than stainless steel controls and a polished, reflective sheen. The scale scales back on the number of controls and buttons, consolidating every control into one interactive knob that functions as the scale’s, power sensor, weight dial, and net-zero button.

In addition to the appliance’s interactive control switch, Hoto comes with an accompanying social media app that allows other Hoto users to share their recipes and pre-measured weight parameters.

Designer: Lu Zheng

The post This smart kitchen appliance replaces a busy control panel with a single interactive knob to easily weigh your food! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This automated mushroom chamber uses smart technology to grow and harvest your own mushrooms at home!





Mella is a household mushroom fruiting chamber that uses smart technology to automatically grow and harvest a variety of mushrooms.

Over the past couple of years, our homes have become test kitchens for everything from colorful sourdough bread to dalgona coffee. Now it’s time to make some counter space for an at-home smart mushroom fruiting chamber.

Mella, an innovative new kitchen appliance from FirstBuild, a co-creation community backed by GE appliances, uses smart technology to grow and harvest your own mushrooms at home.

Smart technology has made mealtime simpler than ever. With smart technology, we can program our appliances to do the hard parts for us. Mella’s automated programming brings just the right amount of fresh air and humidity into the fruiting chamber to allow mushrooms to mature at the right time and speed, growing into full-size, edible mushrooms. With automated technology running the show, seasoned mycelium harvesters and recreational growers can sit back and enjoy the show.

Located on the outside of Mella’s chamber, the water basin can easily be refilled to funnel in just the right amount of water to combine with fresh air and become humidity for optimal mushroom-growing conditions. Then, the hygrometer indicates the humidity levels inside the chamber so that users can always keep tabs on the best conditions for harvesting mushrooms. Four LED lights also pour light into the chamber to ensure the mushrooms receive the necessary amount. Finally, a WiFi-compatible program controller allows users to adjust Mella’s settings as they see fit to help mushrooms grow.

Summing up Mella in their own words, the team behind FirstBuild notes, “Made for those mad about mushrooms Mella controls and automates the inputs necessary to grow delicious, edible mushrooms in the comfort of your home.”

Designer: FirstBuild

 

Smart Kitchen Appliances that will transform you from a home cook to a MasterChef!

The perfect set of kitchen appliances can make your daily life and cooking sessions a whole lot easier! But, honestly, after an exhausting day at work, I really don’t have the energy to deal with cumbersome and technical kitchen appliances. This is where smart kitchen tech comes in! Smart kitchen appliances quite honestly do most of the work for you! You simply press a few buttons, adjust some settings on the touchscreen, and most of your kitchen chores are almost done. Smart kitchen appliances can be a blessing in disguise, and we’ve curated some of our absolute favorites from you. From a smart cutting board that track’s your food’s nutritional value to a smart wok that automates most of your cooking work – these innovative kitchen appliances are the superhero sidekicks, you need on your cooking adventures!

That plastic kettle sitting on our kitchen counter probably looks like something from a time capsule compared to all the other appliances that have gotten design makeovers. Finally, it is the kettle’s turn and the B POINT shows it all off. It features a touch interface that instantly gets the appliance up to speed with others and lets the user form a more organic connection with it. The circular display has two rings – the outer ring shows the temperature and the inner ring shows the water level inside. Countdown starts after setting the water temperature and will beep once it is ready! The choice of CMF really elevates the simple appliance into an aesthetic product that you can display proudly on your kitchen counter.

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Decker is an all-electric appliance so grilling on it is devoid of fossil fuels like coal. It creates a smokeless experience which is perfect for an urban kitchen or a balcony. Young millennials and Gen Z have little access to the experience of cooking food on a grill. Using a BBQ grill indoors only creates a fire hazard but most living quarters don’t allow them because of the smoke and soot which can be bothersome in cities where people are often living too close to one another. The team elaborates, “We created a clear yet functional UI that displays options as and when the functionalities are selected. The display screen is a hi-definition OLED display that is touch-sensitive with multi-touch as well as provides haptic feedback to the option selected. With the three functional elements of a stove, grill, and oven, the options for each use case are already mapped out so the user doesn’t have to navigate through a whole bunch of visual clutter thus creating a Dynamic UI.”

Food One was designed for young people living in cities who don’t have either the time or skill set for cooking multiple meals throughout the day. Beginning early 2020, the pandemic’s quarantine orders forced many of us out of restaurant booths and into our kitchens to cook our own meals. Fully integrated with smart technology, Food One operates as a classic smart assistant, with Bluetooth connectivity and app compatibility to connect to your smartphone or other smart devices. After connecting to Food One’s app, users can choose from a long list of available recipes suitable for cooking with the smart wok. Alternatively, those who enjoy cooking can upload their own recipes to Food One’s app for others to learn and follow.

There is a Korean practice of covering food with a cloth (Sang bo) which has been a tradition for centuries and has worked well – a ramie or silk fabric covering keeps it ventilated in the summers while a thicker fabric keeps it insulated in the winters. Inspired by this, the Mother’s Heart was designed to keep food fresh and retain its original nutrient quality. It is a simple device that is crafted like a dome food covering and an accompanying base plate. The covering has a dial on top and that lets you adjust the settings based on the food you’ve cooked. You can select between refrigeration or warmth and there is a timer feature that lets you select for how long you want to keep it running.

The Café Appliances Specialty Drip Smart Coffee Maker is a smart coffee machine with built-in WiFi that lets you enjoy drip coffee without any hassle. Amped with Voice-to-Brew controls, you can customize your own coffee, and even control parameters like temperature and strength. The built-in WiFi allows the gadget to connect to Alexa, Google, and the SmartHQ app. The auto brew setting enables you to prepare your coffee exactly the way you want it! Not to mention, it has been amped with a sleek and stunning design!

The Foody looks like most smart speakers but comes with a few crucial design details that set it apart. While it is, in spirit, a smart speaker, perhaps the most interesting detail on the device is a circular display on the top that slides from left to right. Apart from acting as a screen for viewing things like recipe thumbnails and cooking times, the display also acts as a switch that lets you tell the Foody speaker what’s in your pantry versus what isn’t. A camera sits at the central position of the circular slider, allowing you to scan the items you purchase. When you buy an item, keep the slider display towards the left and scan the item to tell Foody you just bought it.

SMART by VLND Studio is as its name suggests a smart water purifier that provides clean drinking water via its 4-step filtration process. The unique system eliminates almost all the contaminants from tap water, including rust residue, calcareous, chlorine, infusible fine particles, bacteria as well as bad odor and taste. SMART’s design focuses on making it as user-friendly as possible. The smart water purifier is easy to use despite its complex functioning. Sleek aesthetics, an intuitive touch screen, and a human-centered design make it attractive, approachable, and simple to operate!

Designed by Germany-based Aurora Life Science, Nutrio takes the guesswork out of your diet. Sure, outwardly it looks like a cross between a cutting board and a cashier’s billing desk at the supermarket, but the Nutrio is in fact a comprehensive nutrition calculator that lets you measure your food in an absolutely new way. The chopping board comes with an entire host of sensors that can detect your food, weigh the food, and display all its nutritional information. Whether you’re using raw ingredients or even packaged products, Nutrio lets you scan your food, calculate your caloric and nutritional intake, and absolutely crush your diet because you’re much more aware of what you cook and eat.

Thermomix TM6 Smart Food Processor Oven is a multifunctional kitchen appliance that does the job of multiple kitchen gadgets! It can chop, slice, fry, steam, slow cook and knead! It transforms tough cuts of meat into moist and tender pieces. It can also sous-vide your meat and vegetables. The smart food processor comes amped with a wide touch screen display and an innovative weighing scale, allowing you to cook your meals in the simplest and most effective manner possible.

The tablefarm is exactly what its name suggests. A tabletop garden that grows your food for you… but not just any food. The tablefarm’s focus is on microgreens, which are probably more nutrient-rich than actual veggies, packing as much as 10 to 40 times more nutrition in their small leaves and stems. If you’re wondering what microgreens are, they’re vegetables and herbs harvested just as they develop their first set of true leaves in about 7 to 10 days. They contain just as many vitamins and minerals as they would as full-grown plants — or even more, and are ridiculously easy and quick to grow… so much so that the tablefarm literally does it for you.