WHAT’S cooking? A new arms race is starting on the unlikeliest of fronts: kitchen design. Sir James Dyson, the inventor, and Qinetiq, the research company spin-off from the Ministry of Defence, are competing to provide the kitchen of tomorrow.

Dyson, the Wiltshire-based designer best known for his bagless vacuum cleaner, has filed a series of designs with British and American patent offices in the past fortnight.

His inventions include appliances in tall, rectangular shapes that fit together on a platform, replacing the pointed spouts, long cables and sharp corners of blenders, juicers and kettles.

Scientists at Qinetiq, meanwhile, are developing flexible crockery that can be bent into a plate, bowl or cup. It uses “shape memory alloys” developed for the military.

Space is increasingly at a premium in kitchens as they become the centre of the house, used not just for cooking and eating but also for doing homework and organising family life.

The new inventions will fit with predicted kitchens of the future which could have devices such as a fridge that suggests meals based on its contents, hologram chefs to guide cooks and control panels which allow that evening’s cook to dial in from their mobile phone and activate the kitchen before they get home.

Dyson’s plan is to streamline appliances and avoid too many cluttering up work spaces. He has taken the concept of the spice rack or matching tea, coffee and sugar tins and enlarged it to design a new “library” of appliances. All can run off the same power supply under their platform.

The controls will be hidden in the lids of each appliance or in panels recessed in their front. Toast will pop out of one of the square tops. Eggs can cook in another.

Dyson said last week: “We file hundreds of patent applications every year to safeguard our inventions. Our intellectual property is our lifeblood, so we can’t reveal any more for now.”

Qinetiq unveiled its plans at a conference in London on new energy technologies. As well as the crockery, other ideas included fridge-freezers that change compartment sizes depending on how much food they contain.

A spokesman said: “It was an opportunity to do some future-gazing and these were the technologies our scientists found most exciting.”

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