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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.

The Mu folding plug

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.

  1. If you’ve no time for video-watching then this story includes a good number of photos of the prototype. 

  2. 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…)