Author Thomas Thwaites. Publisher Princeton Architectural Press. Release 20 March Search for a digital library with this title Search by city, ZIP code, or library name Learn more about precise location detection. View more libraries The Toaster Project. Copy and paste the code into your website. Have you ever thought about fabbing a toaster from scratch? Using 3D printer technology to create all of its components and then assemble it I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
I read your account in order to stay abreast of my students for whom it is summer reading. After four hours of reading I am inspired and am sure the students are as well.
I think I might cycle to a lake, throw my bike in and build a refrigerator! Hi, I was asked to read your book for my school and I wanted to ask if your toaster still works today. If not, for how long has it been working? Did you use it on a daily basis or rather put it on the shelf as decoration?
Thank you, Zoe. I had some warm ish bread though. I think we will be doing some hands on research though and giving it a try! Also, my grandmother was a geologist and seeing you collecting materials reminded me fondly of my youth, when we would go to the copper dump and search for bits of cast off copper.
Thank you! The Toaster Project is fabulous! Your appreciation of the technology behind this mundane household icon reminds me of my dad. It has been certified as the largest in the world by Guinness World Records. I found your toaster projct book in Japanese edition at Kyoto prefecture library in Japan.
I realized that almost all the convienient things are made by the mass production technologies. The project let us know the amazing technology and development history, and problems facing our important natural environmet. Hi Thomas, The humility the Toaster Project inspires is fantastic and very much needed.
Would love to talk more about the ethical role of speculative design and philosophy. Lisa Banu. Sorry for the year delay in replying to your comment. Hi Thomas, I was reading about your goat project and it intrigued me, so kept clicking through and ended up here on your website. I read The Toaster project last year and have found it one of the best conversation openers.
Love your work. Thanks, -Lady Bugg human jeweller. I find your work fascinating. I work as a jeweller and am investigating biofeedback devices and ways redundancy can be combated by object values. There are some examples on my website if you get a moment to have a look.
It would be good to have a chat sometime. Thanks, Emma Bugg. I just had a conversation with a genius friend called Alvaro Cassinelli alvarotwit. He has written a short story imagining how long it would take you to make a smartphone if you had absolutely all the knowledge and skill — the limiting factor becomes how quickly you could move. I really really doubt that in one human lifetime, even with perfect knowledge, you could build a smartphone.
Let alone a toaster. I received this book as a gift…. Which was the best thing that ever happened. Your book opened up the areas in my brain that are shutdown by boredom of routine. Now cant wait to start with Goatman. Hope to see more crazy projects from you in future You are the coolest!! You are a very good writer. I like that your toaster looks like it is made of melted cheese. Funny and thoughtful book. Made me think about were our stuff comes from. I liked that you put in a Hitchhiker Guide reference.
We thought the line that the rest of the universe looked down on earthlings because we thought a digital watch was the most amazing thing was very funny. It was hard not to laugh out loud. I also have a big passion for my future. You and your book will help me when I suffer.
Thank you. Thwaites quotes Carl Sagan's "apple pie recipe," which begins, "you must first invent the universe," but that's a little much for a 9-month thesis. For steel, the first raw material, Thwaits admirably begins over 9 billion years after Sagan, choosing an iron mine in Britain to mine ore in the hopes of smelting it.
Of course, the hole has already been dug and he ultimately removes the ore from a display case rather than with a pickaxe, but begins to get his hands dirty right after using a sledgehammer to break the ore into pieces. It doesn't take long before he discovers that "modern" engineering schools teach on a level far above 3 domestic scale. Engineers in 21st century schools get only slightly closer to iron smelting than Journalism students get to the CPUs that run the computers they type upon.
Thwaites's has to reach all the way back to the 16th century to find a text that explains basic smelting. Still, each one of the modern appliances he used as a concession were really only devices that let him complete a complex process faster. Fortunately for him, the next material, mica, is little more than a footnote. It's a mineral, requires no smelting, and is easily chipped off of a nearby cliffside.
His concessions for the next material, plastic, are a little more severe. Although he begins with the audacious goal of visiting an offshore oil rig, BP says "no.
Consequently, after hand-carving a two-part mold out of wood, his attempts at making starch based plastics instead of oil plastics fail, and he ultimately turns to recycling existing plastic. It works; at least insofar as one can call the unfathomably ugly carcass of a toaster that appears on the cover a success.
From there, the next two steps are covered in far shorter chapters. He extracts copper from the tailing ponds above a copper mine using electrolysis and the chapters grow shorter as the book moves forward.
The last metal, nickel, doesn't occur in Great Britain, so after an abortive discussion of Siberia, he orders copper coins from Canada and rolls those into wire out of a machine. Based on the brevity of the final chapters, it sees that that the fourth constraint finishing on time trumped the first three. The last chapter, assembly, is covered brusquely, and the only obvious concession made during assembly is that he runs his toaster off of a DC battery current rather than the far more dangerous AC current in the wall.
That said, the final photograph of his admittedly subpar toaster in context on the wall of a department store with a price of 1, pounds is punchline enough to forgive the concessions he made along the way.
The Toaster Project is a bit of a [near] infinite regress. By delving deeply into every aspect of production, what appears to be an industrial design exercise ultimately ends philosophically, and can't help but leave the reader pondering "life, the universe and everything," which happens to be the title of a slightly different Douglas Adams book than the one that inspired his own "hitchhiker's guide.
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