Hasta La Ideas

Electrolux Design Lab, the annual design competition that asks design students to envision the future of product design, is coming into the home stretch for this year. Some 1700 entrants from around the world have been winnowed down into just eight finalists, through three rounds of judging, with the winner to be announced on October 16th.

This year’s EDL was a little different in that the categories were opened up a bit, expanding beyond appliances into accessories, consumables or services. Still, two out of our three finalist faves still fall into the appliance category.

First up is the ballet-dancer-inspired 3F (for “Form Follows Function”), a shape-shifting vacuum cleaner by Germain Verbrackel, an ID student at France’s Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique:

Writes Verbrackel:

It is designed to economise space in compact and urban apartments; thanks to its autonomous mobility and capacity for physical metamorphosis, -3F- is a living product, responsive to its consumer’s needs.

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