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Why the ‘Kitchen of the Future’ Always Fails Us

This is that kind of nostalgic sexism we can laugh at together now, because we’re over it, right? Not so much.

Imagine the home of the future. It probably has a lot of glass. Maybe a robot butler or two. The living room is full of egg-shaped furniture, the family owns a drone, the television is part of the wall, the thermostat calibrates the temperature of each room based on the body temperature of its occupants, using data gathered from their subdermal implants.

Around the corner, in the kitchen, our lovely future wife is making dinner. She always seems to be making dinner. Because no matter how far in the future we imagine, in the kitchen, it is always the 1950’s, it is always dinnertime, and it is always the wife’s job to make it. Today’s homes of the future are full of incredible ideas and gizmos, but while designers seems happy to extrapolate far beyond what we can do today when it comes to battery life or touch screens, they can’t seem to wrap their minds around any changes happening = culturally. In a future kitchen full of incredible technology, why can we still not imagine anything more interesting than a woman making dinner alone?

Read the rest of this post on Eater. »

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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