Our home lives are changing but what does this mean for both designers and consumers? For London Design Festival 2020 we co-ordinated a popular and hugely insightful virtual panel for Fisher & Paykel exploring the ever changing design landscape in domestic kitchens and homes during 2020's lockdown and beyond.
The 45 minute design event which took place live on Zoom on Monday 14th September can now be watched on the London Design Festival website in full for those unable to attend on the day. Watch the video here
The virtual panel, hosted by interior design journalist Amy Moorea Wong, invited F&P designer Simone Stephens, Sheena Murphy interior designer and founder of Nune, and leading life and style content creator Susanna Hawkins with 300,000 Instagram followers, to discuss the rapid evolution of kitchen design in the last 6 months.
With so much of our lives now being lived out online we were delighted with the results of this first virtual UK event for Fisher & Paykel. Attended by both press and designers it was shared to an audience of more than 600,000 across LDF's channels and on design bible Dezeen!
Here, our host and DMC friend Amy Moorea Wong summarises the discussion in her own words:
The landscape of the kitchen is changing. Along with today’s ever shifting social climate, the role of the kitchen in the home is dramatically different to what it was at the start of the year. For Fisher & Paykel’s digital panel discussion, The Social Kitchen; Design for a Changing World, part of London Design Festival 2020, I had the pleasure of discussing what the kitchen of today looks and feels like with three prominent, yet very different figures in kitchen design; content creator Susanna Hawkins, Sheena Murphy, founder of interior design practice Nune, and Simone Stephens Fisher & Paykel’s Chief Designer for Architects, who joined us from New Zealand.
The panel was in agreement that now, their kitchens are working harder than ever before. Of all the rooms in the house, it has borne the brunt of the new indoor-based lifestyle we have recently been faced with, not only having to provide the whole family with three meals a day, but its food-based function stretched to extremes. We discussed how our new way of living has come to revolve around the kitchen, initially as a space to work and home school, then evolving into a more social space, a place to catch up over a meal for a moment of pleasure in confusing, repetitive days.
It came to light that the biggest kitchen trend of the moment is a heightened awareness of the true functionality a kitchen has, ranging from clever storage features to hold more shopping than usual, to self-cleaning ovens in this era of hygiene awareness and the DishDrawer™, which can be used in two halves so dirty tableware doesn’t have to linger on show. Right now, kitchen design is looking inward to the workings of every appliance and efficiency of each centimetre of storage space. While aesthetics are still important – with the current visual trend, not surprisingly, for soothing, comforting spaces – what we are seeking is an intuitive space that makes life easier and calmer.
Watch the full recording of Fisher & Paykel’s virtual design discussion now on the London Design Festival website.
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