Engineers have an endearing, if stubborn, habit of designing for the world as they think it should be, rather than how it actually is. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in the kitchen, which remains a monument to the nuclear family. A standard oven is an enormous, heavily insulated 70 litre steel chamber. It was designed on the assumption that on any given weekday evening, someone is going to roast a chicken, two sides, and a crumble for a spouse and three children.

Today, the single most common domestic setup across Western cities is a household of one or two. In London, there are more single-person households than families with children.

If you live on your own, firing up a large oven to heat up two sausages feels slightly unhinged. It takes fifteen minutes to get the air warm, during which time your hunger, and perhaps your will to live, quietly drains away. You are commissioning a small power station to toast a snack.

The tech industry’s answer to this was, naturally, to add Wi-Fi and an app. For ten years we were told the future of cooking was an oven that pings your phone when it hits 200°C. Total rubbish, of course. What actually took over the world wasn’t smart ovens, it was an ugly plastic bucket with a glorified hairdryer stuck to the back.

The air fryer is not a culinary marvel. It is simply a small, very impatient convection oven. But it conquered modern countertops because it solved a demographic reality white-goods makers spent thirty years ignoring: people are tired, they live alone or in pairs, and they refuse to heat a cubic yard of empty space just to crisp a samosa.

Once you look at appliances through this lens, the rest of the kitchen starts looking equally odd.

The traditional upright fridge assumes a weekly car journey to an out-of-town supermarket. In an urban flat, half of it ends up functioning as chilled long-term storage for six jars of specialty mustard bought at a farmers market three years ago, and the other half for bottles of water. Modular, refrigerated drawers under the worktop make vastly more sense.

Then there is the dishwasher. If you live alone, filling one takes five days, by which time the porridge bowls have petrified. You either run it half-empty with a heavy conscience, or you run out of spoons. Rory Sutherland has espoused the virtues of twin dish-drawers, one for clean, one for dirty, cycling back and forth. I'd go one further - we have self-cleaning ovens, why not a small self cleaning cupboard that runs every night?

We tend to assume domestic innovation is driven by thermal dynamics or materials science. In reality, it's driven by who actually walks through the front door at the end of the day.