Now that we knew what we wanted, the pieces fell into place. We decided to make a storage in the lower level of the house that would store the food in a safe manner, cold when needed, and connect an elevator to this system. However, not any kind of elevator, but an elevator that leads directly into the kitchen of the apartment. We called this “the Recivator”. The Recivator can of course receive any kind of goods, but we focused on the food deliveries. The design we came up with allows the delivery to be ejected out onto the kitchen counter.

Imagine never having to lift another grocery bag for the rest of your life. To control this elevator we needed an interface and decided to put it up on a large screen on the hatch of the elevator. This would be a touch screen so the people living in the apartment could use it both as a TV, a computer and as a centre to control the smart home functions of the apartment. We are sure there would be more smart features in this apartment and thought it was nice to design for a way to gather them all in one place. The reason we decided to go big instead of small was not only to gather the functions of smart home applications, but mainly to build upon the notion that the kitchen is the heart of the home and emphasize its social aspects.

The other kind of social aspects are the outward ones; crowd deliveries are done by making a deal with a food grocerer that they will deliver daily, or maybe even twice a day, if the residents order from them. This means a person can order small and still get it without charge, because the sum would most likely be over the required amount every time thanks to the number of orders. To add a social element to this and strenghten the environmental aspect we thought up the “free for all” concept. The food stored in the house is kept safe, but what if someone is not ordering up the ordered items. They will go bad eventually. There will be a time limit to get your food set to a week. After that the food order will be free for all. Then any neighbour can press the screen and get the order delivered to the apartment.

To design this we made a house model in the scale of 1:5, allowing us to show functionality of a small elevator going from bottom of the house to either one of two different apartments, unloading a package. The elevators’ motor is made of Lego Mindstorm NXT. There is also an actual interface that is projected on a large touch TV showing a basic version of this system.

.