Something green and gooey in the fridge is usually a bad sign. I say that with solemn deference to my mother’s yummy lime JELL-O mold Passover staple, complete with magically floating mandarin orange slices (which, despite its annual holiday role, still seems to me to be distinctly non-Jewish in appearance). I’ll go so far, though, as to call my mother’s (and her mother’s before her) trembling creation an exception to the rule and return to my original premise: Green goo + fridge = bad.
Aha, but not necessarily so! At least not necessarily so in Electrolux’s goofy future world where Yuriy Dmitriev’s Bio Robot Refrigerator serves up a non-sticky, odorless biopolymer gel (yes, it’s green – in the pictures anyway) that’s not only not a bad thing to have in your fridge, it actually pretty much is your fridge.
The (very) experimental design was one of 25 finalists in the Electrolux Design Lab 2010, a competition that asked industrial design students to “create home appliances that consider shrinking domestic spaces.” Winning ideas were required to “shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes in the homes of 2050 when 74 percent of the world’s population are predicted to live in an urban environment” dictating a need for greater space efficiency.
Four times smaller than a conventional refrigerator, Dmitriev’s Bio Robot’s biopolymer gets its food-preserving coolness through luminescence. All you do is grab your eggs (or whatever) and shove “˜em in the goo, which morphs around your foodstuffs creating “a separate pod that suspends items for easy access.” There’s no doors or drawers or motor, so more than 90 percent of the device is doing the good work you need to keep your eats fresh – if not appetizing. The thing can be hung vertically, horizontally, or “even on the ceiling.” Quite the space saver.
Inhabitat’s Britt Liggett, provides us with a few more details, noting that the cooling agents are the “bio robots” inherent in the gel that use luminescence. The device uses zero energy for cooling (it just needs energy for its little control pad), compared to the typical modern fridge, which uses about eight percent of a household’s energy.
Oh, and I love this little kicker from the Electrolux site: “Products in plain view and easily accessible.” Oh yum.