By Martin Vedris

SYDNEY: Sydney Design, the annual design festival run by Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, is this year displaying four Electrolux cooktops as part of the ‘Improving Life’ exhibition of Swedish innovations, from August 4 to October 14.

The ‘Improving Life’ exhibition showcases more than 60 Swedish-designed products from companies including Electrolux, Volvo, Sony Ericsson, Dignitana and Husqvarna.

With modern homes focusing on form as well as function, and many appliances evolving beyond traditional ‘white’ colours and purely functional designs, Electrolux have aimed to add emotion into the mix with their cooktop designs on show.

The four featured cooktops from Electrolux emerged from more than 100 sketches produced in a creative workshop. The working names are E-Box, E-Spin, E-Float and E-Dish. The E-Dish concept was selected for continued development.

The E-Float designer wanted to create a sense of purity and weightlessness with the cooking surface appearing to float above the cooktop. Clever lighting creates an illusion of a floating cooking surface. Inspired by Japanese culture, the E-Float’s black colour is symbolic of new life and rebirth.

The E-Box was inspired by the Japanese Bento eating box and the idea of hidden functionality. It is an object of art whilst not in use but opens to reveal an induction cook-top.

Inspired by the ‘Lazy Susan’ which is a rotating tray placed on top of a table to display and hold food, the E-Spin round spinning cooktop bridges the gap between food preparation and eating.

Selected by Electrolux for further development, the E-Dish is reportedly to be launched into the market as ‘Aurora – the world’s most beautiful cook-top’. It features a clean and illuminated cooktop that looks more like an elaborate chopping board. It is a minimalist and ‘futuristic’ design.

The ‘Improving Life’ exhibition defines an ‘innovation’ as an invention or further development of a concept that has achieved commercial success and presents innovations that were developed to satisfy needs, to make lives simpler, or improve society. The Electrolux concepts displayed in the exhibition have evolved from purely functional cooktops to forms of home sculpture.