The Cardboard Wi-Fi Router is an idea for “an eco-friendly and affordable wireless router” by Ehsan Noursalehi that won an honorable mention in Autodesk, Core77, and iFixit’s “Design for (Your) Product Lifetime” competition. His idea is a relatively simple, but insightful one: What if you used the packaging as housing for the product during use? This “no waste, just product” philosophy helps to minimize the impact of superfluous packaging and details, and can even turn a simple aesthetic into a selling point.
Many people say that all good ideas should elicit a response of “Why didn’t I think of that?!” and Noursalehi’s router design does that and more. Each aspect of the product, from clever packaging / casing, to modular and easy to disassemble components, to consideration for the developed and developing world, shows clear and thoughtful design. Often, designers aim to improve one or two aspects of a product. With the Cardboard Wi-Fi Router, Noursalehi has improved many more than that.
Noursalehi’s design takes many thoughtful approaches to sustainable design. It incorporates concepts such as Whole Systems and Lifecycle Thinking, Design for Disassembly and Recycling, and Environmental Properties of Materials which you can learn more about on our website. Its very creative design and its ability to fit into existing manufacture and sales models are both extremely impressive, and give us great hope that one day everybody will be able to find a Cardboard Wi-Fi Router on the shelf of their nearest electronics store or online retailer.
You can learn more about Ehsan Noursalehi’s Cardboard Wi-Fi Router here (PDF).
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 Cardboard Wi-Fi Router Project Outline | 2.25 MB |
