COURSE POST #2: THINGS ARE COMPLICATED
For both the technologically inclined and those that resist its innovations, society as a whole is becoming increasingly more dependent on technology. Thomas Thwaites’s “The Toaster Project” demonstrates how something as seemingly basic and inexpensive as a toaster, is actually a lot more difficult to create with minimal help from technology. Thwaites took on the project in order to “highlight how dependent we have become on technology and how far removed we are from the processes and systems behind most of the technologies and devices our every day lives depend on” (Dunne & Raby, 2013) according to Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s book, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.
Thwaites’s demonstration and what Toaster Project argues is visible on city streets as well with the implementation of mobile pay parking meters, for example. Paying a parking meter with your phone may seem easy - until it isn’t. For those that wish to resist technology and not own a cell phone, paying for parking becomes 10x more difficult than using the traditional method of coin and meter. Even for those that do have a cell phone, the pressure to have the phone’s battery charged is there. For what seems as such a simple machine as a parking meter, the demand for utilization of technology highlights the dependence society has on “buying in” to technology.