Morphy Richards
Small Kitchen Appliance

This live second year project with Morphy Richards was based around designing a small kitchen appliance. After initial research and testing, it appeared that there was scope to create a new style of food slicer.

The below slideshow shows some of the early sketch work, exploring form, colour and concept.

It was important to create a new style without losing the Morphy Richards brand.

In the chosen concept the motor would be housed in the bottom and drive a cutting disk which would slice/grate/shred food into the compartment below.

The slideshows below hold insights into the early design stages. Here, it was important to fully explore a range of aesthetic styling that could possibly lead to a new Morphy Richards range, as well as creating interesting new concepts on how it would physically work.



After much consideration, a compact design was chosen in response to the brief as I believed it could promote interesting but not over-complex development of a suitable design and design language. From this point I started focusing on form and mechanics.

Logbook pages - research

Design priorities, as decided after reverse engineering.

Reflecting the chosen concept against design criteria.

In the final design, the motor would be placed in the top adjacent to the food chute allowing an easy transition of power directly to the slicing disk.

Two components create the top section, allowing for the chute to come off for cleaning. The food then falls into a removable PC container which further reduces mess, a feature picked up on very early from the research.

Power cables travel upwards from the base inside the steel bar; configured this way to allow the power control to be conveniently at the bottom near where it would be held during use. 

The power cord/plug wraps around the whole product and slots into the plunger neatly, solving the issue of cable management found in the existing slicer.

Regarding a new visual language, orange was chosen as to introduce a splash of colour for a range, identified as a colour trend in the automotive industry at the time ( according to research carried out in 2014). It was complimented with a bright white finish on the rest of the product along with the extruded steel shield behind the container that supports the weight of the top of the product.