Thomas Thwaites Toaster Project at the RCA

June 26 2009

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Want to get some industrial designers riled up? Get them talking about how detached modern consumers are from the manufacturing process.

At some point in their education or early career, most product designers are faced with the realization that current standards of living depend on massively complicated networks of suppliers, manufacturers and distributors, and that hardly anyone considers their existence when making purchasing decisions. Initially a source of fascination, akin to discovering a secret world in your basement or something, it often turns to frustration. A repeated argument of the sustainable design movement holds that if people only understood how much effort and expertise, and how many resources went into the production of their inexpensive goods, they wouldn’t be nearly so cavalier about chucking them in the garbage at the first glimpse of something prettier.

Rather than spilling more ink about this global phenomenon, Royal College of Art student Thomas Thwaites (MA Design Interactions) has turned to a demonstration, in the form of a toaster. He’s been building one for the past several months from scratch, in the most thorough, radical sense possible: the project has seen him visiting mines and oil drilling platforms to obtain raw materials, synthesizing plastic for insulation, and learning to smelt iron in a microwave:

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