Originally Published: November 2010

This was an interesting university project as I was tasked with finding out why domestic hostess trolleys went out of fashion and to design a new one for the modern consumer.

I often had issues when asked to redesign a product, as I prefer to think about the root problem and new or better ways to solve it rather than being asked to improve an existing solution.

However with regards to hostess trolleys I found that problems still existed when you have people over for food; you can often run out of preparation space, quite often you want to keep more drinks cold than you have space in the fridge and there can still be the problem of needing somewhere to keep some dishes/food warm.

So my solution is a portable kitchen block that has a top surface you can prepare food on, a lower surface for temporarily placing utensils, and an insulated compartment for keeping food/drink warm or cold for longer. This is a design whose chopping surface now makes it a product to use everyday rather than the rarely used traditional hostess trolleys.

With this project we were also told we could not use our 3D modelling software or rendering package so these visuals were done using Photoshop and Illustrator.