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A Design Philosophy (cont'd)

:: Circulation and Light

Many older kitchens are too dark. New windows, skylights, internal windows, and even removing the occasional wall can help make the kitchen brighter. Older kitchens also often have poor "circulation", or traffic patterns. Traffic crosses the work area, the entry is awkward, or the kitchen is in the wrong relationship to the other spaces in the home, inside and out. Sometimes the kitchen is too isolated from other areas, or too much of a hallway to them. Fixing these problems is just as important as new cabinetry or appliances.

My books on kitchen design describe this design process in much more detail.

:: Kitchen research

Many years ago, I spent part of a winter studying the history of the kitchen, and the wonderful research that was done on kitchen design by the Gilbreths in the thirties, and later by researchers at Cornell University. This work underlies modern ergonomics. It's about ways to observe how people work, how they move as they work, and how to put this knowledge to use in kitchen design, or any other design project.

Though this work was sponsored by cabinet and appliance companies, its results were largely ignored by them. But it has been the basis of my kitchen design work since I first encountered it. My book "The Motionminded Kitchen" describes this research.

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