Imagination has no boundaries, I’ve said it before, and I could say it over and over again. Whether we’re fully aware of the development of mankind or not, we witness the immeasurable creativity of the human mind on a regular basis. It’s like an explosion that can’t be stopped, whatsoever, the primordial Big Bang that created the universe and reinvents it day by day.
Maybe I wasn’t born to be an inventor, I’m pretty sure about that, but I can’t explain myself how people come up with all sorts of unbelievable concepts. I, for example, have always thought that food has one purpose and one purpose only: to be eaten. It’s the tragic destiny of fruits and vegetables and I’m mildly sympathetic. It’s hard to be one, when you are not left alone and your life comes to an end earlier than expected. But what’s better: a sudden end or a bunch of ingenious people having you sculptured according to their imagination?
In this context, toast printers shouldn’t take us by surprise. They are not something new, but one of the finalists in the design competition run by the appliance manufacturer Electrolux brought a novelty which made everyone talk about it. It’s a scanner designed to print out any graphic or text onto a slice of bread and it’s said to be the first internet-enabled toasting printing appliance. I don’t know where this fascination with burning images into toast comes from, but one thing is for sure: you can read your RSS feeds or the latest headlines at breakfast, from your slices of bread and then eat them.
The Scan Toaster was created by industrial designer Sung Bae Chang, student of Sejong University in South Korea, and submitted it in the 2008 Electrolux Design Lab contest which ends October 9 in Zurich, Switzerland.
The small printer is about the size of a CD case and connects to a computer via USB cable. Once you’ve plugged in the toaster to a free USB port and the slice of bread is in its place, pictures, logos, news and weather are downloaded and the software will start burning what you want.
The toaster features a network of toasting “modules”, meaning hot wires that rotate within a 30 degree radius and help burn the image or text onto the slice of bread. As far as printing elements are concerned, they are small enough to toast pixels at a fairly high resolution and with varying brightness (burnt-ness, in this case) and allow recognizable brownscale images.
The Scan Toaster is undoubtedly a very interesting concept, but it’s still in its design stage, so there are no plans to manufacture it on a mass scale. Although it’s fun to see what level technology can attain, I’m not sure I’d like my boyfriend to eat at breakfast a slice of bread with my face on it. For the only reason that having such a piece of art destroyed would be the greatest sin of them all.
