China must be an interesting place to be an industrial designer.

In America and Europe, we've had a middle class for roughly 100 and 200 years, respectively. And we have a pretty fixed idea of what appliances should look like, and how they should work, because we've had them for all of our lives. But China's middle class is fairly new. This gives their designers leeway to experiment with new forms and typologies, because to Chinese consumers, virtually everything is "new." If you come up with a concept that might seem wacky to Westerners, the Chinese consumer will still give it a look; they don't care if there's precedent or not.

As one case in point, take this 3-in-1 Sink Dishwasher, by Fotile (a high-end Chinese kitchen appliance brand). It's top-load rather than front-load, and is bundled together with a sink. Because the Chinese diet consists of plenty of produce and seafood, the thinking goes, why shouldn't the thorough cleaning action of a dishwasher be applied to those things too, rather than just dirty dishes?

The product uses both hot water and ultrasound to rinse dirt, pesticides and residues off of fruit, vegetables or fish, which you place in a basket above the cleaning works. The machine then dries them using convection heat.

As far as size, it's about half the capacity of a typical American dishwasher. That said, in the past several years the company has made inroads into the U.S. market, pitching the unit to smaller families as well as RVs and even yachts.

If you're curious, the company's been on the market here for long enough that YouTube now has American review videos posted by consumers.

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