The Origami Handset is a sublime expression of lightness crafted by Chengyuan Wei (???) of Weii Design.
Currently living and working in the city of Hangzhou, Wei has been putting his education at Zhejiang University to good use, designing a number of esthetically pleasing items such as a self-balancing, Segway-style scooter for the INNO company and the eco-friendly, solar powered Light Gap clock.
It’s Wei’s minimalist telephone handset, however, that perhaps most succinctly expresses the artist’s rejection of “a unified system… created by big commercial corporations.” After disassembling a telephone handset one day, Wei discovered that “all the functional parts only took a small space inside the handset. So I thought maybe I can design a unique handset which has a light and material-efficient structure.”
Looking at the Origami Handset, you can see that these kinds of electronic devices really have very few parts and most of those are comprised of thin, flat circuit boards. One realizes that these types of handsets could be much smaller than they have always been; the only things holding back miniaturization are issues of practicality.
I can only see one problem with Wei’s design: after a heated conversation, you can’t take out your anger on the other party by slamming down the receiver. You can crumple it into a ball and make a three-pointer into the nearest trashcan instead. (via Gigazine)
