It is amazing how important it is to talk to the people who use your product. Years ago my bit of east London was being gentrified.

One day I went in and the bar area was totally updated with a nice (old) bar top taken from another pub, moved forwards into the bar areas, giving loads of room for the staff being to move and work (on a Friday there could be about 10 staff serving at once).

But when talking to the bar staff they hated it - the tills were along the back wall, and the beer tabs were on the bar side - so they could no longer pour a pint and take payment at the same time.

The bar had been 'improved' by the owners, who had obviously never worked in a bar or talked to their staff.

I see some similarity to the kitchen of my aunt (mother's side). My mother has formal education in home economics. She laid out her own kitchen using a technique where a day of work is simulated with a paper plan, pins, and thread between the pins for every movement. I always thought that was very clever in its simplicity, and yes, the result is that commonly needed things are within reach where they are needed, and outputs of one step kind of naturally end up right where they need to be for the next step.

The Swedish state did a similar study in the 40s where observers took very detailed measurements of everything women did in the kitchen during the day and then optimised every part of the kitchen design to save both time and effort. Most apartments built between the 40s-60s in Sweden are designed based on these studies.

My SIL has a new house, built in the last 5 years, and the kitchen SUCKS. There's a big island in the middle of it that makes it impossible to make a trip to any other part of the kitchen in a straight line and its so big that it is hard to walk past someone else in the kitchen.

I'm in an 80's apartment and it has all kinds of issues mainly related to having hardly any space for storage and it's all in the wrong place anyway.

But since I am a fan of Adam Savage and watched his cave evolve especially with his new paradigm of a shopping area and a work area, I recently had an idea for rearranging my kitchen.

There are three areas of the kitchen the work area (sink, prep, and stove), the storage area (pantry, refrigerator), and the eating area (table, dishes).

When you are getting ready to prepare food you need ingredients from the storage area, and tools (knives, cutting boards, bowls) and it needs to be near the sink for washing and the trash for waste. Then the prepared food can move to the cooking area which has the stove, pots and pans, hot pads, and utensils. The eating area needs easy access to getting the hot food to the table and getting table ware (dishes, glasses, silverware) to the table from storage and to the sink/dishwasher/trash for cleanup. It's like a fractal of triangles to design a functional kitchen.

I used the dimensions of the Frankfurt kitchen for the design of the kitchen space in the studio apartments I designed.

The dimensions ended up being the only part of the Frankfurt kitchen I re-used. I Decided that the Frqnkfurt kitchen 2.0 would be mostly countertop and sink. The idea was that the rest of the system could be modified to the end user's taste.

The whole project has taken much longer than I expected but I'm now turning the corner. The next phase for me will be fabricating components that can be mixed and matched.

I will make a number of shelves and cabinets of different dimensions. The building will end up with catalog of objects that tenants can use or have modified to meet their needs.

After moving to Germany a few months ago, I asked a contractor about the wiring for the lights, and one phrase he used to describe it was "deutsche küchenordnung," referring to some features that made it especially efficient. I'll bet the etymology is related.

There’s a moderately good episode of Roman Mars’ podcast on the subject.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen...

My mother still has one of those, funny to see it featured by moma :-).

There is also a German word "Frankfurt bath", when you place the shower in the kitchen, with some of these arangements still present in flats today.

100 years later there is a housing crisis again, even in Frankfurt, and construction plummets with no Frankfurt Kitchen 2.0 in sight. Ironic.