Context

One of my initial ideas came from the thinking that cars in the winter need to have their engines run for a period of time in order to warm up before driving. I wanted to extend this idea to my toaster, but instead of having it be for mechanical purposes, it is more related to how the toaster “feels”.

Another inspiration for my line of thinking with this project was Simone Rebaudengo’s Addicted Products project, which questioned our relationship with objects and our ownership of them. While not directly related to my thinking with the toaster, I found the notion of giving an object agency to just leave to be very interesting. I took it as inspiration for Chilly Toaster, to think about giving the toaster some agency in the same way.

The project that explored in my think piece, Trainable Measures, also inspired some of my thinking for the Chilly Toaster. In Trainable Measures, kitchen helpers were given the ability to understand a human’s sense of a “pinch” of an ingredient. I tried to incorporate this into Chilly Toaster as well, thinking about giving the toaster a human’s sense of “chilly”.