My recipe for kitchen IT

I’ve just had a new kitchen installed. In the process I learnt that Britain’s best-known kitchen supplier is really a financial services company with a sideline in the joinery business. The supplier takes your money, holds it on deposit and then contrives to deliver a series of wrong components on time, and then to send the trivia, such as an oven or a sink, weeks late. Weeks, indeed, after you have ripped your old oven and sink out in the expectation that new ones would arrive.

Many forecasters in the 1970s and 1980s predicted that one of the key roles of computers in the home would be to provide cooking recipes on demand. How wrong they were. They should have predicted that one of the key roles of computers would be to arrange for kitchen-buyers to experience the Supply Chain From Hell.

So what can we now expect of the IT-assisted home and hearth in future? Electrolux boasts of Internet fridges that will re-order your favourite victuals when they run out. And Korea’s LG makes fridges, washing machines, microwave ovens and air conditioning units that are all Net-enabled.

LG reasons that you should be able to control appliances remotely, and that its machines should diagnose faults and contact an engineer of their own accord. It also suggests that instead of playing with the magnets on your fridge, you should be able to use it to surf the Web and leave notes – in the form of videos – for other members of your family.

Although I admire LG, I’m not sure about all this. It seems to me that the frequency, duration and intensity of the need to control a domestic appliance remotely are all quite low. Ditto the need to leave a video note for other members of the house – and wouldn’t a quick Post-It do the job just as well?

There are obviously some more pressing tasks facing kitchen IT. Children should be able to use smartcards to earn parental loyalty points for just showing up, punctually and with their hands washed, at meal times. When they sit down to eat, IT should automatically disable their mobile phones.

More seriously, wireless LANs have begun to spread through US homes, and look set for multiple-laptop homes in the UK too. But the real role for kitchen IT revolves as little around communications as it does around cooking or remote control. Instead, IT will empower robots to help us clear up and clean the kitchen – which together with the bathroom is often the dirtiest room in the house. If we can’t get technology to end domestic drudgery, we might as well give up.

According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and its 380-page report entitled World Robotics 2002, 700,000 robot vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and window cleaners could be sold, worldwide, by 2005. Of course, domestic robots have been promised for a long time; but they do appear – finally and, at about £1,000 each, rather expensively – to be on their way.

The UN figure may be an underestimate. Personally, I would pay any amount of money for a robot that would lay and clear the dinner table, stack and unstack the dishwasher, and clean my kitchen floor.

You can say that I’m a dreamer. But with the detritus of Christmas looming, I’m not the only one.