Some damn fine design work

[xela]

I am something of a design junkie, always on the lookout for objects where a need is met with both engineering elegance and appeal to the senses.

Anyone who's ever plugged something in to a wall outlet in the UK has noticed that UK power plugs are big and bulky and pretty much unavoidably ugly. Royal College of Art student Min-Kyu Choi thought this was a problem that needed solving. The result is simply brilliant.

Yet another reason to wish I could live in England: So I could replace my ugly plugs with these when they reach the market....

(Hat-tip to nakor, inasmuch as it's his fault that I was skimming Joel Raymond's twitter feed, where I found this.)

Comments

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Did you perhaps only look at the first picture, Sam? The new plug fits in your old sockets — you just rotate the two shorter pins 90° (see the third through fifth pictures, and the last one). The student also designed an adapter that lets you connect three of the new plugs, in their low-profile orientation, into one of your existing sockets (see the sixth through eighth pictures).

If the plug design required new outlets, it would just be so much wanking — or, more politely, the sort of impractical ivory-tower design exercise you see all the time from students (and, too often, from professionals who should know better as well). The practicality is part of what makes it brilliant.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Yes I did, and now I've looked again I see what you mean. It might be useful for those times when you need to plug several appliances into one socket and it would save space. Possibly also it could be safer when there are toddlers about, or people with disabilities that make them likely to trip over wires. People would need warnings not to misuse it by overloading sockets, but that's already a danger with existing types of adaptor.

In fact I think Watson would absolutely love this thing so if you ever hear that it's gone into production, please let me know and I'll buy her some :-)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Yes, from all you've said about Watson, she's my kind of geek, and this would be right up her alley. She might also enjoy two animations on the student's own website (one partway down, another at the bottom): http://www.minkyu.co.uk/Site/Product/Entries/2009/4/20_Folding_Plug_System.html