Design Friday: The Kitchen SyncInternational Home and Housewares Show 2008
Laptop, meet the cookbook. We saw the Kitchen Sync design concept several weeks ago, and we were surprised and happy to meet its designer, Noah Balmer, at the Housewares Show. Balmer received an International Housewares Association design award for the Kitchen Sync, which we hope goes into production soon.
The concept for the Kitchen Sync is quite simple, and brilliant. It’s a new generation of cookbook for your kitchen – the perfect melding of the recipes you can find online and the old-fashioned cookbooks that sit on your kitchen shelves. Read on to see how it works – lots more photos below…
As much as we love our tattered and spattered well-used cookbooks, we are turning more and more to the web for good recipes. We like the communal nature of the web and the ability to pick and choose recipes and mash them together as we go.
But how to bring them into the kitchen? We don’t like printing everything out, so our laptop has sticky keys and a flour-spattered screen – and now our lovely iPhone is also developing telltale signs of kitchen use.
Balmer’s concept invents a whole new kitchen appliance – a small, flexible, washable screen with a dock. You can download recipes directly and follow links to buy necessary products and see tips online. The Kitchen Sync brings new web recipes together with the old-fashioned coobook, with no need for laborious printing or sticky laptop screens and keyboards.
It’s wireless and very kitchen-friendly – our pick for the cookbook of the future! We’d like to confine our precious recipe books to the dining room table and let the real wear and tear take its toll on a flexible little tool like this.
This is still a concept, but as it won a prestigious design award already and Balmer is interning for Karim Rashid this spring, we hope that some affordable version of this goes into production soon. Good luck Noah!
• Noah Balmer’s official website – Check this out for some more great kitchen design and products, as well as all the details on the features of the Kitchen Sync which we were just able to sum up here.
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