Innovation: from mundane stuff

why didn't we think of that!

The Royal College of Art's graduate show has opened, and this year, the show-stopper was actually -- a plug. Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passerby with his neat, apparently market-ready plug that folds down to the width of a thin mobile computer.

"Many of today's mobile computers have become wafer thin but here in the UK , we still use the world's biggest three-pin plug," says Choi.

Enter Choi's slimmed down British three-pin plug wonder.

It's so plausible and so obvious a product that it should produce a few red faces; how many more years are we going to endure attaching our palm sized mobiles and wafer thin laptops to an object that's barely been touched since its first design in 1946?

Choi picked an everyday product that most other designers might have found too mundane to dabble with and drastically improved it - exactly the kind of thinking that we should be celebrating right now.

Meanwhile, his surname reminds me of a Yemeni's version of Seasons in the sun by Terry Jacks when we were staying at the Methodist International House in Leeds (1973/74) :

"We have Choi (actually spelt Tsui from HK), we have Chan (from Malaysia), we have Susan (cleaner's daughter) in the kitchen..."

It was funny then, and now only those who were with us then would be able to relate to it.

Incidentally, our Yemeni friend who finished his doctorate in Leeds University should be in a very responsible position now.

Tsui at the time, was with a group from Hong Kong who did their first degree, master degree as well as doctorate, mostly in textile related courses. Their university mates would have included the well known singer - the late Leslie Cheong Kwok-Wing, who died in 2003.

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