A fancy steam oven, cooker hood and fridge freezer that makes your kitchen look good enough to eat
AEG’s Neue Kollektion is full of crisp clean lines, stainless steel all brushed in the same direction, polished glass: all making you feel like you actually know how to cook.
With the whole collection having been entirely redesigned we grabbed AEG Electrolux design manager Adam Szczepanowski to talk us through how an entire collection was put together, and the importance placed on AEG’s strong design heritage.
– The redesign started in 2008, with final designs being ready by September 2010 and lots of testing to follow that.
– “We always go back to consumer insights, looking with our consumers: have we got it right? Have they changed over the years? What we thought were those spot-on consumer needs from five years ago: ‘well it’s kind of shifted a little bit’ – and we have to keep following that, but also ahead of it.”
– “It’s constantly evolving, all the time we have to think about our visual language and how that’s slowly evolving. You can’t suddenly decide that ‘oh we’ll do this over here’ because we’ll lose the brand identity and people won’t recognize it as an AEG product.”
– “You know what a Mercedes Benz looks like, and even if you were whipped forward in time from the 1970s and dumped here today, you could still pick out a Mercedes Benz – you have to keep the brand identity and heritage.”
– “We can’t be purely stylistic nowadays. 30 – 40 years ago, maybe it was the case but now we have to work incredibly closely with our engineers, developers and our team of mad scientists!”
– Rhino and Alias are used for modelling, based on the designers preferences. A special surface design team work with the ideas and refine them into accurate closed geometry that works well with Catia.
– “We work very, very quickly with prototypes because you can maybe draw something on paper and then you see something at the right size in three-dimensions and you think ‘whoa! I need to change that; alter that; refine that’.”
– Every detail down to the sound of the oven door closing to the feel of the buttons on the cooker hood being specifically worked on.
– The entire range works around the core materials of stainless steel and glass. “That’s not a restriction at all – it’s a challenge. Working within these parameters is part of the brand, part of the feeling we have with these products.”
– “AEG products have been exceptional and it’s a very hard rhythm to raise.”
