“The Toaster Project” chronicles my attempt to make an electric toaster from scratch—literally from the ground up. Starting with digging up the raw materials from abandoned mines around the UK, then attempting to process them myself at home, and finally forming them into a product that can be bought for just £3.94.
My toaster cost £1187.54 and took me nine months to make. I managed to obtain and process just five materials—iron, copper, mica, nickel and plastic—compared to the 100 or so used in the shop-bought version. The laboriousness of producing even the most basic material from the ground up exposes the fallacy in a return to some romantic ideal of a pre-industrialized time.
It’s an electric appliance that disavows the infrastructure on which it relies. A convenient item that rejects the convenience of consumerism. A mass-produced domestic product, “manufactured” on a domestic scale. Its contradictions, however, serve to highlight the amazing efficiencies of modern capitalism, but also to question our current trajectory. Massive industrial activity in the pursuit of additional modicums of comfort at lower prices - small trifles, such as an evenly crispy piece of toast, to which we quickly become accustomed.
I like toast though, as well as many of the other trappings of 21st-century life. But at a moment in time when the effects of industry are no longer trivial in relation to the wider environment, the throwaway toasters of today seem unreasonable. The provenance and the fate of the things we buy is too important to ignore.

Links: www.thetoasterproject.org

Thomas Thwaites (UK), with help from Simon Greton (video, UK), A Young Kim (book design, Korea), Daniel Alexander (photography, UK), Jan Cilliers (mining advice, UK), Irene Gunston (smelting help, UK).

Thomas Thwaites (UK) Technology, science, economics and culture … trends, fictions and beliefs. Thomas Thwaites is a designer whose work examines how these interact to shape our present and our possible futures. He graduated from the Design Interactions masters program at the Royal College of Art in 2009. As an undergraduate he studied economics and biology at University College London, and this training informs his design work. He imagines scenarios, designs products and undertakes projects that aim to identify and communicate ambiguities in technological and social change.