Imagining the future household refrigerator: A study investigating the dimension of user needs

Household refrigerator concepts have evolved with changing applicational scenarios and requirements, providing users with support for healthy eating, personal care, and other activities in the kitchen and other areas of the home. However, current research on exploring user expectations and requirements for household refrigerators lacks considering the perspective of applicational scenarios and activity support. For this study, we invited 45 participants to explore immersive experience methods and conducted semi-structured interviews to investigate user requirements for future household refrigerators in different home areas and obtain dimensional details related to user needs, ultimately generating new insights into the demand for connected, intelligent, emotional, easy to use. Our findings are instructive for the design of future refrigerators in household scenarios and provide guidance and references for the design of other smart home appliances.