Robin Southgate as part of his final year industrial design project at Brunel University, London designed a ‘Weather Toaster’.
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Design: Weather Toaster
Never mind burning data onto CDs. You can now toast information from the net onto bread, thanks to Robin Southgate’s elegantly simple marriage of old-fashioned thermal mechanics and smart new internet technology.
For his final-year project at Brunel University, London, the industrial design student created a weather-forecasting toaster. Plug it in, connect it to a phone point, pop in a couple of slices and set the dial to your preferred level of browning. When the toast pops up, a stencilled weather symbol tells you whether you can expect sunshine, cloud or rain.
How does it work? A modem inside the toaster dials to a server using a freephone number, which then accesses the Met Office website, where it retrieves the information it needs and translates it into a simple single number – 1, 2 or 3. Each number corresponds to the weather symbols for cloud, sun and rain. The symbol is then branded onto the bread in the toaster using a heat-resistant stencil which is interposed between the bread and the heating element.
Although the heating element and some of the insulation were cannibalised from his own toaster, he built all the electronics from scratch. And to keep the toaster’s communication with the net as simple as possible, he decided he needed to learn the web language Java. This design solution required Southgate to teach himself from a book and ‘took up a large chunk of that year’.
The idea apparently came to him from nowhere. However, as a fan of the TV series Red Dwarf, he says he may have been subliminally inspired as a child by the sci-fi sitcom’s talking toaster. The Toaster idea was also a reaction to the straight-faced earnestness of most final-year projects. ‘There was a certain level of expectation that we should do things that were properly beneficial to humankind’, he says. ‘Other people were working on really useful things like innovations in wheelchair technology’. So he was pleased when, of all his fellow students’ projects, it was his radically life-unchanging invention that received the most attention.
Southgate has already experimented with a more sophisticated stencilling system than the three fixed designs in his weather toaster. He is using for example a variable grid which allows numbers and letters to be printed onto bread – although his prototype required more than the 13 amps that conventional toasters run on. However, he’s reluctant to discuss current plans in any detail beyond the fact that ‘they’re not at all weather-related’. This reticence is understandable, given an unfortunate patenting wrangle. An early interview about his toaster was printed before his patent application was posted, thereby voiding his claim, ‘Once an idea is in the public domain, you see, no one can claim ownership of it.’
Nevertheless, the advertising industry provides an obvious market for his idea. With bread providing an ever-renewable medium for changing logos and updateable messages, the branding opportunities are limitless. It’s a perfect marriage of product and market; Southgate comments wryly ‘Like my toaster, advertising strikes me as something that’s fun but ultimately, completely useless’.
Writer: Murray Healy
Published on 01 October 2001, CultureLab http://www.culturelab-uk.com
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