According to the brief, by 2050 we’ll have just 35.2 square-meters per person to occupy (around 380 square-feet). The designs range from a waterless closet, which “washes” your clothes as they hang inside flat sections that you can browse like the posters in the local mall’s head-shop, to the virtual kitchen (picture right) which gives the lucky inhabitant a helmet to wear that projects him into a computer-generated kitchen. As he pretends to prepare food, his movements are transmitted to a robot chef in a real kitchen elsewhere in the building. Think Pixar’s Ratatouille, only with a helmet instead of hair-pulling, you instead of a filthy rat, and an awesome robot chef in place of the idiotic Linguini.

That design might be my favorite, despite the distinctly retro use of virtual-reality. It is also complete fantasy. Much more helpful, and much nicer to look at is the External Refrigerator from French student Nicolas Hubert. The fridge looks like a giant iPod Shuffle, and bolts to the outside wall of your apartment. To open it, you open up the window and then pull the internal section of the box out like a drawer. The design not only saves space inside, but also stays cold in Winter without any power, and lets the heat extracted waft away harmlessly in the Summer.

I only see a couple of faults. One, it could end up in direct sunlight, which would be hard on the cooler, and in cold weather you need to open up the window to grab a beer, letting all the heat out of the room in the process.

The finals are being judged right now, and it’s worth heading over to the project pages to check them out.

Electrolux Design Lab contest [Electrolux. Thanks, Mattias]

Authors: Charlie Sorrel

to know more click here