Imagine ten years later we’d sit in the kitchen and have breakfast. We look at the toaster or better on the crumbs under the appliance and feel annoyed. Once again we think that an obvious little change of the construction could avoid this dirt. Because today we are in an initiative mood, we look in the web for the plans of the appliance. In former times groups produced well-protected and monopolized mass-articles. But nowadays for virtually all goods there is the Open Source alternative.

A similar situation as ten or fifteen years ago in the area of software. So we re-design and send the plans to our preferred manufacture in the next village.

Of course they can’t produce all the parts on their own, but we know that they can easily get them because the firm is part of a production-cluster. So we reload the new plans with a description of the improvement. A few days later we receive the ‘updated’ toaster and also a thanks-e-mail of the developers’ community of the appliance that already implemented the correction into the current design.

And again we remember the pre-prosumers-era, when psychopathic multinational company sold mass-products too often not according to our imaginations. Communication had happened only into one direction: by an invasive, pseudo-need-producing advertisement.

This mass-selling paradigm has lost its importance. The triangle user, developer and producer became smaller and in the centre there returned the human being with its needs. The used devices to satisfy these needs became - voluntarily or not - more sustainable.

As an alternative to sending back  the toaster to our manufacture we also could deconstruct the appliance into its modules if we liked to. We could throw the organic parts to the compost and bring the rest to the technical recycling which brings any module back to its reuse as it was planned while being designed.

[Update]

26.03.2010: Funny ... Thomas Thwaites tried exactly this: building a toaster from scratch.