#btconf Düsseldorf, Germany 17 - 18 Apr 2023

Thomas Thwaites

Thomas Thwaites is a design researcher who undertakes projects that are not-quite possible (yet), as a means of probing the psychological and social impacts of technologies.

His work has been shown at galleries and museums across six continents including the National Museum of China, Cooper Hewitt, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul, ZKM, and is in the permanent collections of the Victoria &Albert Museum the Design Museum London, the Banque De France, the Groote Museum, and the Asia Culture Centre (South Korea).

His projects occasionally receive a phenomenal amount of media and academic attention, as with his Toaster Project, where he attempted to make an electric toaster from scratch, and Goatman, where he attempted to take a holiday from being human. The books of these projects have been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Norwegian (with a forthcoming German edition of Goatman).

He’s received multiple awards for his work, including from Prix Ars Electronica, (Honorary Mention), The Wellcome Trust, and the renowned ‘Ig Nobel Prize for Biology’.

Goats and cars: beyond failure

Over the past decade Thomas Thwaites has created an eclectic range of projects, always skirting the edge of the technologically possible. He’ll talk about some of his other work, his narrative design process, his adventures as a goat, and his current project to create a completely Harmless Car, to explore the landscape of guilt.

Speakers