Cube-shaped kitchen appliances could save counter-space

James "Bagless Vacuum" Dyson has proposed a new model for kitchen appliances: making everything square, without sticky-outy handles and other lumps and decoration that increase the appliances' footprint. Hilariously, he's applied for a patent on the idea of "make-everything-square." Uh, James? I think White Castle may have some prior art.

Their answer, given in patent filing US 2009/0095729, is a simple one: make all free-standing gadgets like kettles, toasters, juicers and food mixers in the shape of tall cuboids that can easily be pushed together on a worktop, with no wasted space between them. As the controls could be recessed in their flat lids or on the front panels, no space-wasting side access is required. The patent also suggests connecting the appliances together - presumably using a common power supply.

Cubist kitchen could stem gadget invasion

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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bigboing

Patent tessellation?
Church

Wait. This guy is seriously patenting the idea of the ‘square?’ (or, ‘cube’ I’m guessing.)

Dibbs on the sphere, the circle, and the d6, d10, and d20! (You can have the d4.)
airshowfan

Actually… wait, dang, #3 beat me to it.
ian_b

I love the idea, but it’s totally impractical. You might as well put a plastic shell around everything, since most kitchen appliances make more since in a circular form (blender, kettle, coffee grinder. Cleaning square stuff can be a pain too when you try to get into the corners.

Also, unless you have common form factors, you end up with just as much wasted space as things don’t fit together nicely (unless you’re a tetris master).

The patent thing also damages the idea. I think it was more to protect branding if Dyson made a whole line of these, but then you don’t have a standard, you’ve got lock-in.
Anonymous

This might be dumb, but, for computer stuff it would be awesome, even if it DOES mean they just expand everything to fit a cubic shape. The problem with computer stuff is that you want to stack it, and it doesn’t stack. All these freaking curved top things.
Felix Mitchell

Cubettles? Squoasters? Rectagrills?

He’s identified a real problem, it’s just the solution that sucks.

Kitchen appliance design has favoured the ‘iconic’ look because people will pay top dollar for it. This is the look that won’t be shoved away neatly, that stands out.

To me, this is an engineer’s solution to a problem in the market. Which is not to say with good branding a line of ‘cube appliances’ will not be successful.

But nobody’s crying out for cube kettles right now.

Also, if you don’t like your kettle taking up space, you can always buy a Qooker instant boiling water tap, like I did.
Anonymous

The Royal Navy has some prior art, I think. My mother bought a set of square cooking pots at a surplus store in Gibralatar in the mid-70s to equip the galley of a research vessel she and my father ran.
neurolux

Hexagons pack nicely too.
carriem

Did anyone else read this as:

Cube-shaped Kitten appliances…?

hheheheh gross.
Anonymous

Ditto #29, the place for modular is computer stuff.

Problems right away:
- Toasters need to have two pieces next to each other to make family size toast and good use of long toasting elements, it seems.
- Heat disspation from toaster. Does it heat up the milkshake in the blender?
- Vibration. Are a toaster’s fine elements made to stand vibration from the blender?
Etc.

With computer stuff, yes stacking is an issue but more than that, the insides should be modular. Not “you can replace a hard disk if you read the manual, unscrew 10 screws, and then have built a few computers yourself”. I mean a whole module can be swapped in and out. They should allow you to have your box, and swap in functionality that you can buy separately. Maybe it isn’t cheap to build that way but certainly might be charming to many potential buyers. Maybe with video libraries etc. getting digital it would make sense to do this for the general consumer. Let’s get rid of the infinite spaghetti of cables too!
KWillets

Rackmount!
brainpuddl3

#10 – he couldn’t do that, there’s prior art –

http://www.shorty.com/bonsaikitten/
Anonymous

Being a design nerd, I bought the Dyson vacuum sales pitch hook, line and sinker. Worse, I sold my wife on the idea…

In the 5 years I’ve had the thing it has never sucked. For a vacuum that’s a problem. Sure, it’s gorgeous, sure it’s environ, but if it can’t pick up a feather off a rug how is this helping.

Now it’s five years later, I’ve taken it to the local shop at least 4 times and it’s never gotten better.

Cute idea on the appliances, but I don’t trust team dyson to make a working product. Bring me a maytag! Hoover! GE! Anything but these dogs…
mr artichoke

This is nothing new. During soviet era in eastern Europe and Russia the idea of making everything square and unified was forced upon people on different levels.

Have a look at architecture. Simplifying, it went something like that: “Let’s take an ordinary house. Do we really need a fancy roof? If you are inside the house, it doesn’t matter what shape the roof is. Why don’t we make the roof flat so it’s easier and cheaper to build? Or let’s make the whole house square, so we can use prefabricated elements to build it. Surely, from the inside it doesn’t really matter. Or let’s go one step forward. Maybe instead of building separate houses, we can stack all those cubes on top of each other, to save the space?” You get the idea.

We ended up with awful looking cities which all look the same, minimalistic, gray and square.

That’s not all, they went yet another step forward. They applied the above rule to all aspects of life. They made people watch the same TV channel (made from prefabricated and preapproved elements), they made them read the same newspapers, they made them wear the same clothes. They tried to made them believe in the same ideas. The effect: bunch of people wearing gray clothes, having gray thoughts in their gray, square minds.

Life is all about differences, the tension, the natural urge to fill empty space. It’s the differences that inspire and provoke, make you think, create and come up with something new. Between black and white there is a whole lot of other colors, not only gray.

Heck, I prefer my messy kitchen top full of different, sometimes strangely shaped things, looking like an Enterprise deck, than something filled with square, neat and boring stuff.
EH

The cube thing is dumb, but I’ve been wanting modular appliances for years now. Imagine if your refrigerator was split into, say, 4 sections. You could have an extra freezer section, or only one fridge section with an oven/microwave section on the top instead of the extra fridge space. As a renter, this idea has become sui generis in my life, due to the abject lack of anything like this in reality. Thanks for Mr. Dyson for picking up on my vibes, as corrupted as they seem to have gotten in transit.
Anonymous

Just imagine how well that square mixer bowl is going to work.
Moriarty

Um, I’ve already patented right angles, and since you can’t have squares without right angles, this upstart will be hearing from my lawyer presently if he doesn’t modify his designs to use at most 88 or at least 92 degree angles instead. I also have a patent pending on the rhombus.
Jerril

#9:

Hexagons pack nicely too.

*puts on nerd hat* And they’re more accurate when measuring across the diagonal, too! *takes off nerd hat*
Felix Mitchell

http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/7629/parallelview.jpg

So it’ll basically look like this?
HotPepperMan

Somehow, the tune “little Boxes” is running through my head.

Where is art, where are the aesthetics, what of beauty… etc?

While I may be more concerned regarding the functionality and effectiveness of delivery of my pop-up toaster, there is a time when I am not toasting bread. At that time I will (very occasionally) look at my toaster and admire it as a thing of beauty.
Anonymous

Sorry, I think my kitchen-aid mixer is a thing of beauty, I like all it’s swoopy curves. Square would be boring. I’m not OCD enough to need everything in my kitchen to be matching square boxes.
Anonymous

i understand why he wants to do this but i dont think this is good execution.

modular and form fitting appliances that save space would be great but can’t we come up with something more interesting then cubes?
nck wntrhltr

It is but a small step from cube-shaped appliances to a horrific socialist revolution.
Anonymous

I would point people to cubeecraft.com (the site that did the little brother papercraft) since they seem weel on their way to cube-ifying everything already.
Anonymous

Why do you want to pack more appliances onto the benchtop anyway? You want tidy, you take things away, not pack them tighter.

The only appliances I leave out are the microwave (too big to move) and the kettle (used often). Everything else goes back into the cupboard until its next use.
Anonymous

@13: but what’s the terrain movement modifier for a tea kettle?
godfathersoul

a nice idea but it seems to me that by trying to patent the idea, he is actually creating more non-square items. Since people will have to pay him to use his idea and the thought of patenting the “idea that appliances should be square” is sort of absurd and one of those lame sort of expenditures or niche fees you expect more from credit card companies and the like, it seems he is doing more harm than good. So much for CC licenses. This is one of those ideas that, if given freely and nicely, can change a lot. If given with a fee, will do nothing but obstruct his cause. Imagine if Apple had been like – “mp3 players should be smooth rectangles. we will patent the idea of the smooth rectangular mp3 player.” absurd!
TJ S

That’s great and everything, but a cube is almost never the most efficient shape for things (in storage space OR energy usage). If it were, we’d already be able to buy them that way.
foxtails

Resistance is futile! Your kitchen will be assimilated!
Anonymous

Dumb. Mostly this will just ‘fill out’ the footprint of existing appliances: imagine the smallest rectangle that will enclose the footprint of your appliance, and then assume that this new idea would actually make your appliance have that rectangular footprint. What’s the difference? It may look a little tidier, but you probably really won’t save any counter space.

In fact, when I think of the appliances I have on my counter top right now, one is already rectangular with no protrusions (toaster), one is round so making it square instead would just waste space (a blender), and one is round with handles so rotating it 45 degrees gets the handles out of the way of neighboring items (rice cooker).
Brainspore

This idea will seem a lot worse the first morning you stumble into your kitchen needing a caffeine fix and can’t tell the the toaster from the coffee maker.
rogerg

and what about heat dissipation?
Anonymous

Makes sense really, but if you really want to save space you need to go further and make things:

1. taller

2. slimmer

A nice tall, slim kettle and a tall slim toaster would be useful my kitchen. Why not have the bread slices in the toaster vertically stacked instead of side-by-side? The tall kettle would be a pain to fill from the tap though.
Anonymous

#2 yeah, if you just make the appliance bigger until it fills the next square in size, you HEVEN’T helped matters any.