Kitchen cabinets began appearing in 1910 and have been a mainstay for food and equipment storage ever since. Over 100 years later, it’s 2017 and cabinets are more than just wooden, wall-mounted boxes. They offer advanced features for ease of accessibility and even under, inside, and above-cabinet lighting and even object tracking arrays.
Cabinets are taking a step forward into the “smart home” age.
One of the challenges facing the adoption of these exciting new features is how to offer equip cabinets with the power they need to provide lighting or integrate with smart home technologies. Our cabinet manufacturing process does not account for how to integrate electronics (especially wire routing) into our line today. We look forward to your ideas for cost-effective, efficient, and design-focused means to integrate electronics/wiring into cabinets.
Our goal for this challenge is to collect designs and ideas for integrating electronics and wiring for smart home and lighting capability into our cabinets. Imagine buying a cabinet that has lighting, sensors or other features built in, with a wire running out to connect to power or other devices.
Answer each item separately in a proposal for what this cabinet looks like and how it is manufactured.
1. Here is an "exploded" mock up of our most simple cabinet design. How will your electronics and wiring integrate into this design?
2. What wiring and electronics would you include?
3. How will we integrate your electronics during manufacturing?
4. Include sketches, drawings, CAD renderings, mock-ups, any other visuals that show your set up.
Your final submission should describe in detail an electronics/wiring/sensor loaded and ready-for-install cabinet.
Additional considerations:
- During manufacturing! We're not looking for ideas that can be added to existing and already installed cabinets.
- Certifications? If you have certification knowledge, let us know what we'd need to have these cabinets ready for sale.
-
Submissions will be graded on the following criteria:
- Meets Deliverables
- Creativity
- Clarity
| Top 10% share $1,000 | Next 15% share $400 | Next 25% share $200 |