Naoto Fukasawa (Muji fame) wins German Design Award Personality of the Year on the strength of forty years of appliance work.
His appliance work started with the Muji wall-mounted CD player in 1999 and continued through Plus Minus Zero's small kitchen objects, the Boffi kitchen line, and recent Magis collaborations. A specific callout that interested me was his "without-thought" philosophy: design that fits the user's existing behaviour rather than asking the user to learn a new one.
My takeaway is to run the Native ID brief through Fukasawa's without-thought test before any specification is frozen. If a user has to learn a single new interaction, we should rework the brief or the solution.
Yanko Design lists ten counter-worthy kitchen appliances & tools designed to live on the counter, not hide in the cupboard.
Check the full list here. It includes a kettle, a bread oven by Mitsubishi, air fryer by Smeg, and some more. One of my favourite from the list is the cool & simple palm grater for it's focus on tapping onto ergonomics and obvious palm grabbing motion. If I were to design this keeping this as a baseline user experience, I'd solve for longer duration usage and for any volume of grating. I'd also think about a pocket on the rear surface to catch the flakes. Anyway, this is an amazing design inspiration.
The other one is BØYD Espresso Machine. It's a beautifully chosen CMF (retro pastel). It's refreshing because most flagship coffee machines are 'serious.' Serious metallic finishes and serious colours. It feels industrial. On the other spectrum, we get the plastic-ey ones. This changes that direction. This is a confidence inducing CMF that in a kitchen where most appliances are moving towards blacks and metallic shades to conceal stains, dirt, this retro-pastel look becomes a unique appliance on the counter.
