Product news: new Neff fridges will come with this golf-ball-textured extendable egg tray by German design studio WerterlOberfell.
WertelOberfell designed Eggwave in collaboration with Tobias Schmidt from appliance-maker Neff.
The egg tray comprises two interlocking layers, one in white plastic and the other transparent, which can be clipped in three positions to store six, eight or ten eggs.
"It was a bit of work to get the rippled surface right," said designer Jan Wertel. "We initially tried to digitally generate it, but it still needed a lot of 'manual' work in the CAD software, so it was almost like digital sculpting."
The first Eggwave trays have a translucent red plastic layer, as pictured below in the story, but the final version will use clear plastic.
WertelOberfell was founded in 2007 by Gernot Oberfell and Jan Wertel, both former students of Industrial Design at the State Academy of Arts in Stuttgart.
We previously published on a table by WertelOberfell that mimics fractal growth patterns found in nature.
Other eggy projects we've featured on Dezeen include a bread roll baked to hold a boiled egg and an exhibition in Liverpool where visitors were invited to roll eggs down seven timber follies.
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Here's some more information from the designers:
Eggwave is an accessory for storing eggs in the fridge. It has been designed for Neff by WertelOberfell, in collaboration with Tobias Schmidt of Neff in-house design, and is shipped with all new Neff fridges. It consists of two undulating, interlocking layers, one in white plastic with a surface structure, the other transparent, that can be clipped onto the base in three positions to allow the storing of six, eight or ten eggs.
The aim was to give an ordinary everyday product that costs only a few cents in production and often gets thrown away, an almost sculptural quality whilst retaining and improving its functionality over its predecessor.
Eggwave demonstrates that a relatively uninteresting product typology can become quite exciting. It embodies our digital design process and shows that "digital design", which is kind of a synonym for crazy shapes, can become a mass-produced mainstream product that has an almost invisible serving function.
The dimensions are 90 X 220 X 35 mm.
Storing six eggs in the space of a dozen is good for what?
Good for those who have a luxury giant fridge but don’t cook at all.
That porous medium will be like a cultivation for salmonella.
Hmm… I buy a box of six eggs. In some European countries, where many people have small family or live alone, it makes more sense to buy each time six fresh eggs.
Hmm, actually it would work if you stacked them in more than one layer. Then the eggs would overlap diagonally both vertically and horizontally, and you would have 12 eggs in 1.5 the height of an egg. It would improve the more you stacked them: 36 eggs in the space of 30 and so on.
Why stop at 36?
The designers always are thinking in making nice things, but where’s the practicality in this?
At least it photographs well.
It looks eggsellent, but I wonder how eggspensive it will be?
Egg carton: transports eggs from farm to supermarket to my fridge. Eggs eaten: carton goes in the compost.
Damn, I wish I had a plastic egg holder in my fridge, so when I’d come home, I’d have to move the eggs from the carton into the plastic egg holder. And every time I’d have used 2 eggs, I’d have to lift the plastic top surface for the sake of space efficiency; while I cannot store anything on top of the egss because they will break (whereas with the carton I could!).
This product is so helpful and speaks of great design intelligence!
What a scrambled design.
Dozen one think it isn’t all its cracked up to be?
Egg tray? Oh, sorry, thought it was a rendering of a new Hadid design.
I would probably use it to try to hold my beads while I am working on a design. Probably never for eggs, though I do like to way it looks.