Not Your Plain Old Everyday Toaster
LEAD: SOMEDAY, toasters may be transparent, flexible or portable, judging from Black & Decker's 'Toast to the Future' contest, which was co-sponsored by the Kansas City chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America. The winners were awarded prizes, ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, in Chicago on Jan.
SOMEDAY, toasters may be transparent, flexible or portable, judging from Black & Decker's 'Toast to the Future' contest, which was co-sponsored by the Kansas City chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America. The winners were awarded prizes, ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, in Chicago on Jan. 14.
The first-prize winner, John Cupit, a 25-year-old senior at the Cleveland Institute of Art, designed a transparent toaster that stands vertically for toasting and horizontally for melting cheese.
Christopher Conley won second prize for his flexible 'toasting napkin' made of heat-conducting plastic. It is meant to be wrapped around a piece of bread and inserted into a stand that does the actual toasting. 'People used to wrap bread in a towel and put it into a coal-burning stove,' said Mr. Conley, 24, a second-year graduate student at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The napkin is powered by a thin gel-pack battery, the stand by regular household current.
Third prize went to Nicholas Dearden, an industrial designer who lives in Middlesbrough, England, for his collapsible portable toaster, powered by butane gas.
'Of all the designs, this one is produceable within a year,' said James Holcomb, the director of marketing for kitchen products at Black & Decker in Towson, Md. Not that he expects any of the winning designs to be produced. 'The intent of the contest was not to get a product manufactured but to stimulate interest and thinking in industrial design,' he said.
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