Whirlpool Home Management Applications

2000 | Whirlpool home management tablet.

The Integrated Home Solutions Team at Whirlpool put forward a project to network appliances over the web and bundle a set of family management applications on a touch UI tablet which would be sold as a package with a top of the line fridge. The applications included were: family calendaring, to do lists, grocery lists, cooking assistant, address book and controls for the networked appliances. This project was somewhat ahead of its time but interestingly enough, 6 years later I worked on a similar project at Microsoft.

Other companies like LG and Samsung were are the time working on similar projects. This work was done around the time of the Audrey Web tablet, which was discontinued. Recently, Whirlpool announced the Centralpark Connection fridge, which is an extension of the work we started back in 2000.

While at Whirlpool I had the opportunity to participate in extensive international ethnographic and contextual design studies focused on family management and in particular cooking. At the time, it was rare to find participants relying on electronic calendar systems to plan the family activities. While at Microsoft 6 years later, it was more common to find heads of household using electronic calendars but there were still users who would rely on paper and would copy appointments and to-dos from calendar to calendar.