This is a simple and brilliant solution to a problem that I've taken for granted so much that I'd forgotten that it was a problem.

As more and more technology works it's way into our lives, homes, pockets and bags, power is a problem, and UK plugs are unnecessarily bulky. If you've ever changed a fuse then you will have seen how little of the space in a plug is actually used.

Years ago, that relatively small waste of space wasn't really an issue, but things are different. In my living room for example, I have a PC, a laptop, a cable TV box, two games consoles (a Playstation 3 and a Nintendo Wii), a stereo, a TV, a modem, a wireless router, a printer, and an iPod/iPhone charger.

Those are all fairly standard items- I've also got some additional kit for an electric guitar, a lamp, a baby monitor, a digital photo frame and a cordless telephone that doesn't work (well, either the phone doesn't work or the phone line has died, but as I don't need it, it isn't worth the bother of finding out where the problem is. But for some reason, if I want Virgin Media's TV and broadband, I have to have a phone line...) Oh, and a charger for an SLR camera battery, and a standard battery charger.

So that's eighteen plugs that need to be connected to the power supply, and sixteen sets of wasted space in each plug. So you need plug boards- which are also bigger than they really need to be (because the plugs that plug into the adapters are bigger than they need to be in the first place.)

If you've ever had to pack to travel with, say, a laptop, a mobile phone and a digital camera, then you probably found that they fit into a bag pretty easily. Three sets of chargers (with three plugs)- not quite so convenient. (A demo a colleague of mine used to do was to to have two carrier bags- one would have a few portable devices- a laptop, a mobile phone, a PDA, an iPod, a digital camera and so on. The other- bigger and heavier- bag had all the power adapters and cables that you needed to carry around with you if you wanted to use everything that was in the first bag.)

The problem is probably worse in the UK, because it's a relatively small market, so our power plugs tend to be just modified versions of designs for different countries. For example, this is Apple's old iPod power adapter;

Not too bad, but you can see in the top right corner of the picture the part that swaps out for different countries' power sockets. When that plug is taken off and a UK plug is put on, it looks something like this;

It's not just that it's bigger; it's also far bulkier. In something like an overnight bag, that's an awkwardly shaped thing to have to pack- I'd say it effectively doubles the space it takes up in a bag.

Recently (in the last year or so), Apple have redesigned the plug for the UK to something more efficient;

Definitely a huge improvement. It's now the size of a standard UK plug. But there's still room for improvement. As designer Min-Kyu Choi shows.

Simply, why not start out cutting out all the unnecessary space from the plug? After all, all you need is three prongs and a fuse.

Of course, the plug folds out to fit into a standard UK plug socket;

This also lends itself to the problem that bulky multi-plugs present, taking up even more unnecessary space;

It's no mean feat to be able to say that you've got a better design than Apple, but I'd say that this fits that description;

Two USB plugs and a standard plug in the same space as a single "normal" plug. Oh- and it's also a single normal plug at the same time.

Genius. And, fitting of my own definition of "genius" as the kind of thing that you think is just a single, simple idea that anyone could have thought of, you can get an idea of the amount of thinking and refining that it took to go from the idea to the execution on Min-Kyu Choi, the designer's website.

It's just the idea of looking at something so simple that we completely take for granted and looking at how it could be improved that is the kind of thinking that I really love.

Maybe next, someone can help me solve the problem of what to do with all those wires...