[Image from Dezeen]
Of all the bright ideas at The Royal College of Art summer show one project shone particularly brightly and remains lodged in my mind.
Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project pursues a simple but daunting task: To deconstruct the most ubiquitous and humble of electronic products and recreate it from scratch. That the finished object resembles a caveman’s approximation of its Argos parent is comic in the first instance and then rather humbling when you see the incredible lengths Thwaites went to in producing it. On display alongside the toaster are the range of makeshift tools used in its manufacture. These include an electric leaf-blower and chimney pot iron-smelting furnace, electrolytic tanks used to refine the copper for the wiring and a mould for the plastic casing (hewn from a tree trunk).
At the culmination of the project he’d spend nine months, travelled the length and breath of the UK and spent £1187.54. The backbreaking endeavour involved in replicating a product which can be purchased for £3.49 in Argos powerfully invalidates the apparent convenience and viability of mass manufacture in itself. But the projects primary genius is in how it confronts myth that modern man is somehow more intelligent and proficient than his predecessors – when in reality modern life is entirely dependant on a multitude of products and infrastructural solutions that we outsource to the developing world and have no knowledge to replicate ourselves.
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