PHILIPS' MICROBIAL HOME PROBE KITCHEN CREATES AN INTEGRATED CYCLICAL ECOSYSTEM WHERE NOTHING IS WASTED

It might look like something from an imaginary steampunk past, but designers at Philips think this could be the low-impact home of the future.

It’s called the Microbial Home. Created as part of Philips’ Design Probes program to “explore far-future lifestyle scenarios,” it is a vision for a collection of household appliances and fixtures that all work together in an “integrated cyclical ecosystem.”

The Microbial Home takes kitchen composting to its extreme, with a closed-loop system in which the waste products from one process are used as energy inputs for another.

The central hub is a “bio-digester island” which has a cutting surface, a gas range, and a bio-digester. Bacteria in the bio-digester feed on organic waste such as vegetable trimmings to produce a methane gas that powers the range and the lights and heats water. Dehydrated sludge from the digester can be used as compost.

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The connected “larder” includes a suspended vegetable garden and a terra cotta evaporative cooling unit built into the table, providing an alternative to energy-intensive refrigeration. Other elements of the Microbial Home include a beehive, a light powered by bioluminescent bacteria, and yes, a squatting toilet that captures “excreta” for the methane digester. There’s even a hand-cranked contraption for recycling plastic.

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Models of these concepts were shown at Piet Hein Eek gallery in Eindhoven for October’s Dutch Design Week, but it’s unlikely that we’ll actually working elements of the Microbial Home in stores anytime soon. Philips’ Probes are exercises in speculative design, intended to spark conversation and spur innovation.

Creating a cyclical eco-system. In the Microbial Home Probe we adopt a systemic approach to many of the domestic processes we take for granted and ask questions about how we deal with resources. It is a proposal for an integrated cyclical ecosystem where each function’s output is another’s input. We view the home as a biological machine to filter, process and recycle what we conventionally think of as waste – sewage, effluent, garbage, waste water. The Probe suggests that we should move closer to nature and challenges the wisdom of annihilating the bacteria that surround us. It proposes strategies for developing a balanced microbial ecosystem in the home.

The Microbial Home does serve as a nice illustration of one way we can make our homes more sustainable though. America wastes 27 percent of the food available for consumptionand about half the energy we produce. A domestic bio-digester can only help.

COMMENTARY:   The Microbial Home Probe kitchen does require an individual that is truly committed to self-sustained closed-loop system that recycles waste and reuses it to produce bacteria which in turn produces electricity.  It's a very cool looking, high-tech kitchen setup, and I have not seen anything like it before.  That honeybee maker is something else, and I would certainly like to know how you keep the bees and the queen bee happy in a confined space.  The Microbial Home Probe kitchen is still an experiment, and Philips has no plans to offer the kitchen for sale anytime soon, but it sure is intriguing if you are into cooking and sustainability.

Courtesy of an article dated October 31, 2011 appearing in Facebook Company Design

Comments

[Lukas Jakel]

hello my name is Lukas,

does somewone know where the PHILIPS' MICROBIAL HOME PROBE KITCHEN was founded, is it a dutch, german or other projekt?

Thanks for help!

cheers

[Paul Broad]

In the Microbial Home Probe we adopt a systemic approach to many of the domestic processes we take for granted and ask questions about how we deal with resources.