9 months for a slice of toast

Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art in London has made a toaster – literally from the ground up. Thomas Thwaites has travelled to mines across the country to get the raw materials for his toaster. Processing these raw materials at home, (for example he smelted iron ore with a leafblower and in a microwave).


He has produced a ‘kind of half-baked, handmade pastiche’ of a toaster you can buy in Argos for less than five pounds (for those non-UK readers, Argos is like walmart). Thwaites’ toaster has cost 1187.54 pounds and has taken him on a 9 month quest around Great Britain. The project web-site is here.

“Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”
Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams, 1992

“The point at which it stopped being possible for us to make the things that surround us is long past. To redress the balance I’m making a mass produced object by hand – creating a domestic product on a domestic scale….This faintly ridiculous quest to make a toaster from the ‘ground up’ serves as a vehicle through which questions about economics, helplessness and life as a consumer can be investigated. The outcome will be a toaster that I imagine will bear a very imperfect likeness to the ones that we buy – a kind of half-baked, hand made pastiche of a consumer appliance.”
The Toaster Project, Thomas Thwaites

Great work Thomas

via develop 3d and we make money not art

Posted in Duann Scott, Maker Movement, Technology by Duann | Comments are off for this post

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