Many Gadgets – Less Space, Less Power

While we love to have a lot of electric and electronic gadgets in our kitchen to ease out cooking, we are also concerned about the electricity being spent and the space they occupy, especially if you live in a matchbox-sized apartment. So, what if we use a single gadget for many purposes? Believe me, the gadget I am going to tell about does streamline your kitchen by combining the efficiency of several appliances and at the same time, saving energy and space.

EcoSwitch

Frog – a global product strategy and design firm – has designed a kitchen gadget named EcoSwitch which does this job for you. The innovation was conceptualized by the team of Frog when they noticed that slow cookers, blenders, hot plates and tea kettles all have individual plastic housings and energy supplies, but basically they either heat a vessel or rotate it. By merging a single motor and a highly efficient induction heating coil along with an array of purpose-built containers, EcoSwitch can replace about half a dozen appliances that crowd a tiny kitchen. Fewer gadgets plugged into the wall means less power lost to phantom load and a single gadget decreases the amount of raw material that is wasted.

Initially nobody from the Frog team was much excited about the gadget because it meant a lot of jobs done poorly by a single gadget and that was not a real great idea. After dozens of prototypes and concepts, the team developed a fine solution of inserting RFID chips in the different pots and accessories which were to sit on the EcoSwitch base station.

When a blender is set on the base station, an OLED display becomes alive and shows only blender controls. Place a hot pot and it will show heat controls. EcoSwitch doesn’t have redundant dials and menus. It takes the burden on itself and thinks for you.

With the intention of introducing users with familiar aesthetics, the base station of EcoSwitch is made of polished and glossy black metal to suit contemporary kitchen décor and it also mirrors MacBooks seen every day by Frog’s target users.

EcoSwitch has its own limitations though. E.g. you cannot prepare eggs and coffee at the same time. However the very purpose behind its creation is to suit kitchens of dorm rooms and micro-apartments.

However, the Frog team thinks that the gadget has wider applicability. E.g. you can connect a fan to the motor in summer and a heater in winter. Thus it is a platform not just limited to cooking. As Jonas Damon, the creative director of Frog says that GE could open the tech to hacker spaces and license this technology to other companies who might invent other new functions.