#PopTech2011: Thomas Thwaites

In a coup d’etat of DIY, designer Thwaites set about building a toaster from scratch. And we mean scratch. Thwaites reverse engineered a seven dollar toaster into 400 separate parts and then set about recreating steel from iron ore rocks, plastic from microwaved potatoes and copper from homemade bromide mush. The result is a hilarious examination of the industrial materials and processes surrounding our lives.

Over the next 20 minutes, he led us through his pursuit of a toaster’s core elements (steel, copper, nickel, mica and plastic), an adventure that came to be known as The Toaster Project, and has since evolved into an exhibit, book and television series.

Thwaites was driven by the fact that, like most of the consumer products we use, nothing about a toaster belies its provenance. “There’s a lot of effort, intelligence and history that goes into making even something like a toaster. On the one hand that's great…On the other hand, is it worth putting all this time, effort and energy into something that is a pretty marginal addition to our existence?”

Thomas Thwaites shares his attempt to create a toaster - from scratch - as an exploration and critique of the modern production processes photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

Where do our things really come from? China is the most common answer, but Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to know more. In The Toaster Project, Thwaites asks what lies behind the smooth buttons on a mobile phone or the cushioned soles of running sneakers. What is involved in extracting and processing materials? To answer these questions, Thwaites set out to construct, from scratch, one of the most commonplace appliances in our kitchens today: a toaster. The Toaster Project takes the reader on Thwaites's journey from dismantling the cheapest toaster he can find in London to researching how to smelt metal in a fifteenth-century treatise. His incisive restrictions all parts of the toaster must be made from scratch and Thwaites had to make the toaster himself made his task difficult, but not impossible. It took nine months and cost 250 times more than the toaster he bought at the store. In the end, Thwaites reveals the true ingredients in the products we use every day. Most interesting is not the final creation but the lesson learned. The Toaster Project helps us reflect on the costs and perils of our cheap consumer culture and the ridiculousness of churning out millions of toasters and other products at the expense of the environment. If products were designed more efficiently, with fewer parts that are easier to recycle, we would end up with objects that last longer and we would generate less waste altogether. Foreword by David Crowley, head of critical writing at the Royal College of Art and curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

This week, Thomas Thwaites (PopTech 2011) of The Toaster Project was interviewed on The Rumpus. Thwaites talks about wondering where things come from, ruining his mother's microwave and taking another crack at building a toaster from scratch...on TV.

I’m a designer (of a more speculative sort), interested in technology, science and futures research, as well as communicating complex subjects in engaging ways. I graduated from the Royal College of Art Design Interactions MA in 2009, and have since undertaken a number of commissioned projects, including work on social trends, futures forecasting, biotechnology, the history and philosophy of science and bicycles.

Thomas Thwaites opens his recent book with a quote from Mostly Harmless, the last book that Douglas Adams wrote in his Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy series: "Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that's it." The protagonist, Arthur Dent, finds himself stranded on a planet of limited technological sophistication and after initially hoping to impress the locals with his technical knowledge, he rapidly realizes that all of his knowledge is predicated upon preexisting technology. Somewhere between a travel romp and an investigation of the modes of production in a modern capitalist society, The Toaster Project tracks his quest to build an entire appliance "from scratch." The sad little toaster he built appears on the cover and looks more like a poached egg than a modern convenience, but by the time the narrative is finished, it's pretty clear that it was a quickly-scrambled quest to get it to look like anything at all.

Maker of projects with a touch of the future about them.
London · http://www.thomasthwaites.com