This is great. I love the fact that this designer has taken a ubiquitous and clunky item and redesigned it to become something svelte and more easily portable. Plugs, with their bulk and three prongs are a pain to pack and transport.

Three-prong folding plug design

(via BoingBoing Gadgets)

At the other end of the scale is this, a winner of an award but really no more than an exercise in futility and graphic design. Unlike the above this project is not a serious attempt to solve a problem through good design as the issue of bike use in the city is more mundane. We already have bikes. We do not need more expensive bikes with transparent solar panels in the wheels. What we do need is more bike lanes, more roads closed to vehicles, more bike racks, bike theft to be taken more seriously by the police, more shared space, vehicle users who respect cyclists right to space, cyclists who respect pedestrians right to space and pedestrians who don't bumble in front of cyclists.

A solution in search of a problem

(via Wired Gadget Lab)

What do you think of my suggestion?

Hoverboard from 'Back to the Future Part II'

It too is based on non-existent technology and also solves the problem of urban mobility in a functional space-saving design. Award please.

Update: We (heart) stuff features the folding plug mentioned above. The designer's name is Min Kyu Choi. He deserves to be very successful.

1 original comment:

Mark, my Mum mentioned this folding plug to me the other day, this is the first time I’ve seen it. Nice design indeed. I saw something similar recently, an American backpacker had a folding, two-pronged European-style plug – that was super-compact.
I’m always bemused by our bulky three-pronged plugs when I return from abroad. When on the road, once you’ve put an adaptor on the end of a charger you end up with a connection to the socket that’s more often than not bigger than the device you want to recharge, much to the bemusement of some foreigners who’ve never seen our three-pronged electric behemoths. However, I confess to a warm, fuzzy feeling when I found them in Hong Kong of all places this year!
Re: cycling – your comments are all valid. One very simple solution, move to Copenhagen where all of the above have come true, it’s cycle paradise, I kid you not ;)
Comment by CharlieO — 24 August, 2009 @ 4:45 pm