The folding plug: a revolution for consumer electronics

When Min-kyu Choi saw an advert for Apple's swish laptop the MacBook Air, famously marketed as being so thin that it can fit inside an envelope, he realised something was amiss.

The 29-year-old design student from South Korea knew the device would look a lot less sleek after the inclusion of a chunky British three-pin plug. He decided to find a solution, and his resulting invention promises to change the future of consumer electronics.

Mr Choi's design for a folding plug, which at just 1cm thick is less than a quarter of the size of the clunky original, is shortlisted for this year's James Dyson Award, which recognises the world's smartest new inventions. A YouTube video demonstrating how it works has already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

"I was on my way to college once and put my laptop in my bag, but when I took it out again there was a huge scratch across the surface which had been made by my plug," said Mr Choi, who moved to the UK eight years ago.

"It was really annoying. A few months later I saw the advert for the MacBook Air, and thought: this is wrong, because people always need to carry the plug too. That's when I had the idea of a really slim one, and started to design it."