Well, almost. First, to set the record straight, Betty Crocker isn’t real, but her test kitchen – an enormous workspace comprised of dozens of small scale home-like kitchens – is. And, recently, the test kitchen received its first large-scale makeover in almost 40 years, one that incorporates ergonomics and universal design to fit the workers whose daily eight-hour cooking tasks would leave most home chefs looking for the nearest take-out menu.

On the outside, the challenge was to build a workspace that looked and acted like a home kitchen but that could stand up to eight hours of use each day. But for designers, there was another challenge – making the individual kitchens accessible by a variety of home users. This meant accounting for size, age and other ability issues while still creating a functional and attractive kitchen.

“The kitchen is the single highest function room in a house,” said Mary Jo Peterson, a kitchen and bath designer who worked on the Betty Crocker project and whose specialty is universal design. “You can do what you need to do in other [home living] spaces without ergonomics, but the kitchen is a high function space. We’re not just talking about the average person … the whole family uses these spaces,” said Peterson. “We want [the kitchen] to be accessible by the least able and the most able.”

For the Betty Crocker kitchen, that meant the designers, including Peterson and architect Rich Bonnin of Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, Inc., had to look at each of the users who would be working there. Peterson spent two days interviewing the workers and used that information to make recommendations on everything from appliance placement, countertop height and depth, storage locations and even lighting. “The kitchens needed to resemble what we have at home,” said Peterson, which meant that, even though Betty Crocker’s kitchens may be used for product development and testing, they still have to incorporate the kind of home appliances and workspaces that are practical for the home user.

Architect Bonnin, who spent two years designing the kitchens that work with about 50,000 recipes each year, saw his share of challenges in designing for such a variety of users. Big handles, easily manipulated controls, lots of drawers that could be easily opened even with floured or greasy hands, plus the fact that Betty Crocker’s kitchens don’t have walls to separate the 20 work spaces left him looking for unique answers. “There are essentially no upper cabinets in any of the kitchens,” said Bonnin, which meant storage would have to be lower, something that both Bonnin and Peterson believe works better for almost every member of the population, too.

“Reach ranges differ for all people but there’s a universal reach range,” said Peterson. To accommodate reach problems and the storage issues, she relied on railing systems located at the back of the countertops for storage items like plate racks and knife racks and other utensils. “Everything can be stored in that place,” said Peterson.

For the homeowner, the accessibility of the Betty Crocker kitchen is just another means of showing how far universal design and ergonomics in kitchens have come. Peterson indicates that an aging population is also demanding a more accommodating home environment and that appliance manufacturers, for example, are readily heeding the call to create appliances that work for everyone. Refrigerators and freezers are no longer limited to just one location in a kitchen: newer designs find the appliances tucked into under-the-counter drawer space that’s readily accessible by cooks of all abilities, ages and sizes. Microwaves are being located at lower levels, rather than just over the stove, to be more convenient for their biggest group of users – children. Dishwashers are available as drawer models to reduce bending. Overall, the trend in kitchen design is to create a space that works for a multi-generational family which, said Peterson, makes the kitchen more livable, useable and convenient for any cook. But she also notes that merely looking at trends isn’t always the answer in design. Sometimes it’s necessary to break the rules to get a space that works for the user.

“Universal design preaches flexibility,” said Peterson, noting that kitchens, as well as all rooms in a house, can be designed agelessly and thus continue to work for a homeowner through the generations, a concept deemed aging in place. “We need to design a space like a kitchen so that it fit us. If it’s the home I plan to live in, I’m going to plan it so it works for me.”

For more information on universal design and ergonomics and how both can help accommodate an aging population in the home or the workplace, see the November, 2003 issue of The Ergonomics Report^™.