The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
From the Publisher: Where do our things really come from? China is the most common answer, but Thomas Thwait es 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.
While a graduate student at the Royal College of Art, Thwaites undertook to build an electric toaster from raw materials. His account of extracting iron from rock, hand-carving a wooden mold for forming molten plastic, precipitating copper out of pools of acidic mine waste, and melting Canadian coins for their nickel manages to be both hilarious and sober. In the end, Thwaites’s toaster was a spectacular failure—a gloppy aesthetic and functional mess that cost £1187.54, or 300 times more than the £3.94 commercial model that inspired him—but it taught stinging lessons about environmental responsibility.
Announcements
Save the Date for This Year’s Designers & Books Festival: November 12, 2016, NYC
Designers & Books Festival: Onstage & Backstage 2016™
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Fashion Institute of Technology
Katie Murphy Amphitheater
7th Avenue and 27th Street
New York, New York
A full day of programming that celebrates the special relationship between the deisgn commuinty and books.
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For more information, contact: info@designersandbooks.com
Details on Designers & Books Fair 2015™
See the Work of Illustrators Revolutionizing Italian Publishing: September 29–October 26, 2016, NYC
Cover Revolution! Illustrators and the New Face of Italian Publishing
Opening, Thursday, September 29, 2016
Italian Cultural Institute
686 Park Avenue
New York, New York
“Cover Revolution!” is an exhibition and book (published by Corraini Editions) featuring work by the most popular and beloved Italian illustrators active in book design, including Lorenzo Mattotti, Franco Matticchio, Guido Scarabottolo, Gianluigi Toccafondo, Emiliano Ponzi, and Olimpia Zagnoli. Curated by Melania Gazzotti.
Details and to RSVP: http://bit.ly/2cy6iBw
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