Making Dishes On Demand

What happens when you are hosting a dinner party for 8 people and 3 extra guests arrive unexpectedly? Well, you can either rush out to buy more plates, seat the 3 guests in the kitchen and give them paper plates, or have your cabinet-mounted machine make more plates. I choose the latter, mostly because it is so damn cool. From the article over at Wired.com

"MIT Media Lab's Counter Intelligence Group, which develops innovative kitchen designs, has created a machine that makes dishes on demand and recycles them after diners have finished a meal. The dishes are made from food-grade, nontoxic acrylic wafers, which are shaped into cups, bowls and plates when heated, then resume their original wafer shape when they are reheated and pressed... The prototype DishMaker is the size of a standard dishwasher, and uses the heating element of a toaster oven to shape the items. To recycle the dishes, it heats them to about 300 degrees Fahrenheit to soften the acrylic, then a press restores them to wafers for easy stacking."

So basically, you never have to worry about broken plates, dirty plates, or missing plates ever again. Of course, some people will still want to have nice ceramic pieces for when the in-laws come to visit, but for everything else people can use these babies.