Reenvisioning the Kitchen: Part 1 – The Spice Rack

XenoAbe Design is starting a mini-series of design challenges. This series will focus on the kitchen and what ways we can make it more efficient, stylish, and useful. Each part in the mini-series we will focus on an aspect within the kitchen and think of ways that we can redesign it. This mini-series serves three purposes here at XenoAbe Design: (a) it provides a way to challenge myself to design things outside of my academic requirements, (b) this particular mini-series forces me to stray into a realm of usability not associated with the web, and (c) bounce ideas off of my Interior Design degree-totin’ wife.

Let’s kick this thing off looking at the spice rack.

We’ve seen many renditions of this. Here’s a few:

The Make Up

So, what are the parts we need to make an effective spice rack?

1. Individual containers for each spice
2. Easy access to each container
3. Some form of labeling

That sounds pretty easy. But what’s wrong with the current design? Nothing is really wrong with it per se, but spice racks are often bulky space hogs and many of them are eye sores in a kitchen. The next step seems to provide the three necessary qualities listed above while trying to maximize the space within the kitchen.

The Idea

Let’s use other things in the kitchen to help us out with hiding the spice rack and maximizing kitchen space. Cabinets? Nope. That’s been done and all it does is lessen our cabinet space. Refrigerator? Nah. That just takes up valuable fridge space and some spices don’t need to be cold anyway. Microwave? Now you’re just getting silly. Under the cabinets? Warmer. Hanging the spices from under the cabinets is only semi-elegant and can still stick out like a sore thumb if not designed properly. Wait…in the walls? Ahhh, right you are.

Tons of people are using tile backsplash in today’s kitchens. We can utilize these tiles in our design. We can pull a section of these tiles out towards the inside of the room and pull out the cabinets as well. This extra room will provide the storage space needed for the rack. Certain tiles will actually be retractable drawers that will slide out upon command and reveal the desired spices.

The Solution

This is what the spice rack would look like when built into the faux tile backsplash. The drawers would pop out and reveal the spices. Every other row would be drawers in order to provide room for the spices to be popped out from the drawer. The drawers are on mechanical sliders, but can easily be popped out for easy cleaning. This is nice in that if a particular spice creates more of a mess then the mess is compartmentalized to minimize clean up.

The spices are also automatically popped up and held in place by some sturdy plastic holders that hold the spice jar in place (as shown to the right).

This design allows us to hide the ugly spice rack in an elegantly designed tile backsplash and easily access the spices while keeping clean up and maintenance to a minimum. But how do I open the drawers? Easy, via the all-in-one touch screen Executive Chef application. We’ll get in to other parts of the application in other parts of the mini-series, but we’ll show you the spices module of it here.

The layout here would correspond to how the spices are layed within the physical unit. It is a touch screen and all the user has to do is touch the spice they want and then the drawer opens up to reveal the spice. Users can add more spices by simply clicking the ‘Add Spice’ button and then select the location of an open drawer. An onscreen keyboard will then pop-up for the user to type the label. The size of the font auto-adjusts to fit within the button. The user can also mark a spice empty so that they know to replace it without having to open up the drawer to find that out. To do this, the user would simply tap the mark empty button and then tap the spice that they need to mark as empty. Labels can be changed if the user switches out a spice within a drawer. The ‘Change Label’ button is for this purpose and allows the user to select a currently used drawer and change the label of that drawer via the onscreen keyboard.

The good thing about this is that the tile can still be a unit installed in a non-tiled kitchen. It can be easily “skinned” to match any kitchen. It allows for a sleek elegant design that hides the ugly, clunky spice rack that we are used to in today’s kitchen. Access to the spices is extremely quick and easy due to the simple, but effective design

Conclusion

This is a new way of thinking of the spice rack. It keeps all the normal functionality of the spice rack while elegantly and seamlessly blending it into its surroundings. The spice rack is now part of the interior design of the room instead of just being an accessory sitting on the counter.

This is the first in a mini-series of kitchen redesigns. We will take a look at other kitchen appliances and accessories in future editions.

What do you think of this redesign? Would you use it? What would you improve upon it? What don’t you like?