Looking back at it, one of the things I like best is our observation that the kitchen of the future is a vision that is perpetually deferred; the whole point of it is that it’s “of the future”. There’s also the way that kitchens of the future always respond to the worries of the present. I’ve always thought that the design language of those 1950’s era fridges that look like safes with big curved handles feel so clearly a product of the cold war, a sense that In The Event of Nuclear Holocaust, Your Food Will Be Safe.

The other thing that I think is worth mentioning was that one of the reasons Genevieve and I wrote the paper together in the first place was a study she and the other PaPR people at Intel did as one of their first pieces of work, where they did some ethnography in the kitchens of Intel engineers with kids, and noticed that the technology used the most, in terms of number of minutes of interaction or whatnot, was the telephone. That was a hugely influential finding for me: the idea that kitchens are a space of communication and community, and that design and technology thereof needs to support those needs.

Oh, one more thing. There was a nice multi-year design project at RISD in about 1999 about kitchens of the future, which is one of the few projects in that domain done well, where they did multiple designs depending on different space needs. Worth digging up if it’s still out there on the interwebs somewhere…