A fridge for sharing

Finally, a fridge that prevents you from accidentally drinking your roommates' - potentially expired - milk!

The Flatshare, a fridge with individual compartments made especially for sharing valuable space with roommates, is the winner of Electrolux's 2008 Design Lab competition.

It's a base station with up to four stackable modules, each which can be customized with colours and add-ons. It even has side handles for packing up and moving!

The inventor, an Austrian student named Stefan Buchberger, says in a release that he got the idea for the fridge "because in many shared flats there is a problem with the refrigerator ... it gets filthy because no one person feels responsible for cleaning it."

He wins roughly $8,000 CDN and a six-month internship with the company's designers.

Other cool designs from the competition include the iBasket - a wi-fi connected clothes hamper and washing machine, Sook, a social networking recipe generator and the Scan Toaster, a USB toaster that prints news and pics on toast. Not sure about the practical applications of that last one, but I guess there are perks to eating your morning paper?