Product Design: Jesse Howard makes a functioning kettle from random objects

I don’t really see myself as the paranoid type but I have to confess to a very occasional and irrational fear that when the technological apocalypse comes (and it will, you mark my words) I’m going to be one of those goons left behind by people with real world skills. As someone who spends more than their fair share of time online I’d be useless in a world without electricity. How do you make a fire? With the switch of a button. Cook a meal? Pretty much the same way. And what about boiling water for tea? Look, I don’t have a clue ok, there’s people out there whose job it is to know these things so I can just keep on tapping away at my keys.

Thankfully some of the technological gatekeepers, the protectors of the knowledge, have decided to share their wisdom out a bit and let us in on their secrets. In the case of Jesse Howard and Thomas Lommée, they want to show us how to use the principles of OpenStructures to make a kettle from simple household components; short pieces of copper piping, bottle tops and simple switch mechanisms. The results look like something we might have had in our science labs as kids or a strange experiment on Look Around You, but that’s an aesthetic I’m very fond of, and if it means I can make a cuppa to take my mind off the end of society as we know it (alright, it probably won’t happen) then I’m all for it.