November 2012 • In Production
No Need to Hide
Georges Moanack’s electric socket can take pride of place, at home or in the office.
By Shannon Sharpe
MANUFACTURER
Punkt.
www.punktgroup.com
At one point or another everyone has crawled under a desk, behind a couch, or around a television to deal with an unsightly jumble of cords. We’re willing to squeeze into small, dusty spaces only because that’s better than the alternative—having the mess on full display for all to see. The people at Punkt., a Swiss company dedicated to simple design for technological products, knew there had to be another option. They enlisted the industrial designer Georges Moanack to pursue this problem, under the art direction of Jasper Morrison. Moanack asked his friends, family, and acquaintances from across the globe to grab their mobile phones and take a picture of their electric sockets. “I got around 150 pictures from around the world—from Japan to South America to Europe to the United States,” says Moanack. “And no matter where the picture was taken, almost everyone wanted to hide the extension sockets.” Moanack’s sleek, round ES 01 is a socket that people will want to display, with five outlets that neatly organize the cords, and a lid to cover them all. Here, Moanack discusses the decisions that went into the design of the ES 01, which debuted at Paris’s Maison et Objet show last September and will be available in the United States soon.
Read Related Stories:
Artful Blend
Mixing influences from East and West, the vernacular and the modern, Doshi Levien creates precision-tooled products with the look and feel of the handmade.
Shelf Life
Ka-Lai Chan’s first mass-produced design is a storage system that signifies self-expression.
It’s Electric
With a $200-million investment and an entirely new business model, BMW makes its first serious foray into the future of urban mobility.
We decided to go for the round version because it’s concentric and the shape is much friendlier. It also made it easier and more logical to rotate the lid to take it off.
One of the challenges was the size. AC adapters and plugs come in a lot of sizes. With traditional extension sockets, when you plug one in you often can’t use the next outlet. Two of the five sockets are rotated, so all of them are fully functional when bulky power adapters are connected.
BACK TO TOP