20 home appliances that marked the history of industrial design

In 1966, brothers Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni designed for Brionvega the RR126 stereo radiogram, one of the most famous radio appliances in the history of Italian design. Today, all modern art fans would kill to have it, because it is a perfect example of the modular structures that were typical of the 1960s, with its two speaker boxes that can be "moulded" and arranged as a cube or a parallelepiped. The controls of the central unit, the one with the amplifier and the record player, are arranged to resemble a sort of smiley face, which is surprisingly similar to some of the emojis that we use today.

Dieter Rams is one of the most influential industrial designers of the second half of the twentieth century. Some of his most iconic works are the radios, record players and stereos that he designed for Braun. In this picture you can see the Phonosuper SK4, a masterpiece of minimalism. Head of Braun Design Dieter Rams also left us his precious philosophy of "weniger, aber besser" ("less, but better") and his manifesto (the famous ten principles for good design), which inspired an entire generation of industrial designers.

In 1938, Milanese architect Franco Albini designed the “Stereo Cabinet in Securit Glass”, one of his most iconic works. It was first presented at the Wohnbedarf competition in Zurich in 1940, and today you can see it at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. Today, electronic devices made of transparent materials no longer impress anyone, but in 1938, Albini's transparent stereo cabinet seemed to have come right out of a rational and high-tech future. In one of the darkest moments of the European history, it allowed people to have faith in the future.  

Radio.Cubo ts522 is another excellent example of the extensive research carried out in the sector of modular design in the 1960s. In 1964, Brionvega launched the product that Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper had designed two years earlier. It was one of the first products meant to be "displayed" at home, instead of being hidden, thanks to an attractive design that reflected the new aspirations and lifestyle of the Italians during the Italian economic miracle. Radio.Cubo is still being produced by Brionvega: it costs 399€ and has now a Dab+ receiver, Bluetooth connection and rechargeable batteries. 

Over the last decade, the vintage look of the home appliances of the 1950s and 1960s, with their characteristic rounded shapes, is the exact opposite of the built-in appliances that we have today. However, over the last decade, they have become fashionable again, thanks to some effective nostalgia marketing campaigns. Smeg 50's Style line is one the most successful lines of this kind: the coloured FAB28 fridge, the protagonist of this collection, looks as if it came right out of a 50s movie.  

The Thermomix, known in Italy as Bimby, is one of the most famous appliances produced by the German company Vorwerk. Hans Gerber, who at that time was the managing director of Vorwerk France, came up with the idea of designing this machine, and in 1971, the original Thermomix VM 2000 was launched on the market. During the 80's, 90's and 2000, the popularity of the product grew, and many innovative technologies were incorporated. The last model was launched in 2014, with a softer and more sinuous design, and many new innovative features. 

First launched in 1995, the FrancisFrancis! X1 is the first and most iconic espresso machine produced by Francesco Illy’s company, which was founded in 1994. The design, which has inspired many competitors, was made by Luca Trazzi, who also designed, in 2015, the new edition of the machine on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the FrancisFrancis! X1.

The toaster is the oldest of the kitchen appliances. It was invented in 1893 in Scotland by Alan MacMasters, but it assumed the form we know today only in the 1920s. The first metal toaster, capable of toasting slices of bread on both sides and making the them pop up out of the slots when they are ready, is the Toastmaster 1-A-1, launched by the Waters Genters Company in 1925. 

A more recent invention is that of the immersion blender, also known in Italy as "pimer", the acronym of the Spanish company that first launched it. Nowadays, there are many immersion blenders from many different brands, but the product has more or less always been the same for all brands for several decades, which is interesting. The reason is due to the fact that the shape of the immersion blender is inherently linked to its function, thus it doesn’t allow designers to express their creativity. Long story short, the minipimer is an iconic object per se, unlike other products on this list. It is as an invention, rather than a specific design interpretation.

Kitchen Aid, just like the "minipimer", is an interesting example of trademark vulgarization. In Italy the name tends to indicate any kind of food processor, in the wake of the first model launched by Kitchen Aid (today produced by Whirlpool) in the 30's. The design of that product was so revolutionary that even today, almost all food processors still have the same recognizable shape.  

The history of vacuum cleaners is closely linked to the history of Hoover, the American company that first turned the invention of James Murray Spangler into a real product. The iconic vacuum-cleaners produced by the Glenwillow-based company (Ohio), are too numerous to be listed here. However, model 29 is the first brightly coloured one. It was designed in 1950 by Henry Dreyfuss, the industrial designer that worked for the company from the early 1930s until 1957.  

Bagless vacuum cleaners are a still fairly recent invention. It was in the 1980s that Sir James Dyson had the idea of designing a bagless vacuum cleaner based on cyclonic separation of dust. However, it wasn't an easy task: Dyson says it took more than 5000 prototypes (5127, to be exact) to get the definitive design. First released to the Japanese market, Dyson's vacuum cleaner came to England about ten years after the first prototype was completed. It was a revolution that disrupted the then very strong market of vacuum cleaner replacement bags.

Korean company LG has been manufacturing washing machines since 1969. It’s a long history full of innovations, from the introduction of the first direct drive model, to the more recent LG Signature TwinWash, the first washing machine that allows you to wash two separate loads at the same time. Signature is LG's new brand of ultra-premium home appliances. The first household washing machine was launched in 1937 by Bendix: it had roughly the same basic functions as today, but it had to be secured to the floor so that it would not move during the washing cycle.  

Anyone born in Italy before 1989 must remember the Bigrigio, the two-tone grey S62 rotary phone produced by SIT-Siemens and designed by Lino Saltini. For Italians, this is the phone "par excellence", because it was the very first device to be rented out to all customers by SIP in the '60s. It was later replaced by another equally iconic but lesser-known SIP design: the Pulsar.

At the end of the 1980s, while Bigrigio was still one of the most popular telephones, the first cordless telephones started appearing on the Italian market. The cordless phone, the latest status symbol of that time, was produced by more than one company, but one of the most recognizable and widespread designs was that of the KX-T3910, manufactured by the Japanese company Panasonic.  

Among our favourite telephones, you'll also find the Grillo. in 1967, the designers Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper won the Compasso D'Oro prize thanks to this small, revolutionary shell-shaped device. The design of the Grillo (or “cricket” in English, because of its ringtone that reminds the sound the insect) had never been seen before: composed of two folding parts, it eliminated the distinction between the base and the handset. Furthermore, the receiver was activated by a revolutionary release opening system.

Designed in 1996 and produced in various versions up until 2011, the BeoSound 9000 was the first real "CD Changer" of the Danish company. It could be loaded with up to six CDs and, thanks to the versatility of its "linear" design, it could be hanged on the wall - either horizontally or vertically, on a special pedestal. The player also allowed you to start a random sequence that could select any track from any of the 6 CDs. Even though it was fondly loved by the fans of the brand, the BeoSound 9000 wasn’t the most reliable CD player, at least in its early versions: the CD laser pickup wasn't very durable, and some recall programmes were warranted because of a problem with the glue used to fix the glass door to its hinges. However, despite its manufacturing defects (later solved in the most recent versions), the BeoSound 9000 is certainly one of the most daring and innovative hi-fi products of the last 25 years. 

Bang & Olufsen's Capri TV (produced from the 1950s up until the 1960s) revolutionized the concept of "TV cabinet" with a series of models that could be placed on a sideboard or mounted on four wooden legs. The trademark of the Capri series was the material used: no longer walnut wood, but teak, which was very popular among the furniture manufacturers in Northern Europe. The Television offered to an always more demanding public the possibility of having a stylish television that went better with the other pieces of furniture in the house. The Television also had a "spectral filter" in anti-reflection curtains, which allowed people to watch TV with the lights on.  

Among the most famous computers of all times, there's the Macintosh of 1984, the first personal computer that also was a status symbol to proudly show off on your desk. Of all its spectacular details - thank you Steve Jobs! - the most unusual was certainly the handle built into the top of the case. Then, in the 90s, came the colourful iMac, another masterpiece of design that revolutionized the concept of PC and helped Apple to get out of a period of extreme difficulty. At the time, Steve Jobs was working with Jony Ive, who designed a lot of iconic products for the Cupertino-based company (just think of the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone and the iPad). Over the following decade, he became one of the most important (if not the most important) contemporary industrial designers.   

Apple's ad for the new iMac made fun of the computers made by most other companies, which were generic “beige boxes”, because of their boring beige plastic shell.  

We chose to end this list with a state-of-the-art device that, just like the Macintosh, is hard to call a "home appliance": the PlayStation 2 by Sony. We wanted to include it for at least three reasons. First, with 159 million units sold, it's the most popular video game console of all time. Secondly, it made it normal for tens of millions of people to have a "console" in their homes (this process began in the early 1990s with the Famicom, aka the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES). Thirdly, it represents the most original and recognisable design language that Sony, with various improvements and differences, has developed with the Playstation 3 and the Playstation 4 (for a total of 190.3 million units sold). In a nutshell, the PlayStation 2 is tan icon of the contemporary home.    In the picture: on the left the PS2, on the right its next, slimmer version.