Folding plug.
Do you remember Min-Kyu Choi’s folding plug design from a couple of years back?
No?! Shame on you. It was a phenomenal bit of work. Look, here’s his original video that went just a little bit viral. I’ll wait while you watch it1.
Memory-refreshed? Right, well, after placing 3rd in the James Dyson Award 2009, taking a gold medal in the 2009 International Design Excellence Awards and winning Designs of the Year Product Award and Design of the Year at the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010, Min-Kyu formed Made In Mind with Matthew Judkins to develop and commercialise the idea.
Fast forward a bit and Made In Mind has now unveiled The Mu, a USB power adapter built around the folding plug concept.
At £25 it’s rather expensive, especially given that the mass-produced reality is slightly uglier and cheaper-looking than the original design, but all credit to them for bringing the product to market. Let’s hope that it won’t be long until they’re producing2 a folding plug to be used with other devices.
Via The Verge.
-
If you’ve no time for video-watching then this story includes a good number of photos of the prototype. ↩
-
Or licencing, perhaps? I’d love to see what Apple could do with MacBook adapters if they used this folding design. (Yes, yes, UK mains adapters are probably only required for a tiny percentage of all the MacBooks sold worldwide but let’s be optimistic, remembering that the head of design at Apple is a Brit…) ↩