LogInCreated by Ritika Kedia, Toaster-Typewriter is an amusing machine that lets one burn letters onto bread, investigating the humor's role in industrial design and encouraging a playful engagement with the ordinary.
Created as Ritika Kedia’s thesis for BFA in Product Design, this project involved the restoration of a 50-year-old typewriter and a $15 toaster, mixing obsolete and modern utensils, cheap and costly, kitchenware and art tools, resulting in a hybrid of a machine that should never have really existed.
Through its absurdity made with conventional counterparts, Toaster-Typewriter facilitates the investigation of humor in everyday objects, envisioning it as a "tool to help design to become a medium for imagination, a coping mechanism, a catalyst for social change, and a facilitator for uncomfortable conversations".
Image Credits: Ritika Kedia
Image Credits: Ritika Kedia
Image Credits: Ritika Kedia
"Design is too serious. Despite being an industry of innovation, we can often be too limited in our approach. Design can and should do more than solve the functional problems of convenience or efficiency.
Objects around us shape our everyday experiences. So what if these objects were made with humor in mind? I am proposing a paradigm shift within the industrial design community: design needs humor", commented Ritika Kedia.
To actually make it work and burn letters on bread, the artist collaborated with engineers in the span of 8 weeks, beginning by reverse engineering the typewriter and the toaster to remove excess material, followed by a deep cleaning of the old typewriter to get rid of dirt and rust to make it type again. Sadly, the machine currently only has three operable letters instead of the full alphabet.
Image Credits: Ritika Kedia
On top of presenting a creative exploration of humor as a design practice, Ritika aimed to propose an alternate history where Toaster-Typewriter existed decades earlier, forcing us to imagine what the world would look like in the present if this was our past.
"What’s so funny about bread? Through this machine, a global staple food is made funny by completely diminishing its value by placing text on it, bringing into view the privileged market that new technologies usually cater to."
Image Credits: Ritika Kedia
According to Ritika, this research on humor is ongoing and she's continuously conducting micro experiments to test the humor in everyday surroundings, pursued through collaborations with other designers and non-designers.
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