In 2007, Steve Jobs asked a fundamental question, “What if your phone was your computer?”. This philosophy kickstarted one of the most successful industries of our time – the smartphone. Two designers from South Korea are asking a similar question, “What if your laptop bag was your laptop?” It’s fair to point out that those two questions are nowhere near being comparable in terms of their practicality, but what Jung Sunghun & Cho Changhui’s design, the Haru, does is change the way we look at laptops.
The Haru turns the laptop bag into your own portable workstation. The bag features a side-to-side lid that is, in fact, a foldable laptop. Detach the lid, unfold it, and a part of your bag basically becomes your laptop. The bag’s compartment can be used to carry other items like accessories, cables, folders, stationery, or anything else you’d need to set up your portable workstation. It’s wild, bordering on impractical, but the more I try to ignore the ‘boring’ practical concerns, the more I realize what a crazy gadget this would be!
Designers: Jung Sunghun & Cho Changhui
“Haru introduces new possibilities for ‘workation’ by combining the functions of flexible displays with the morphology of bags. Designed for users on the go, Haru provides expandable workspaces that can be easily organised and transported. Its three modes — hanging, compact, and expanded — suit various settings,” say the designers, who won the Red Dot Award: Design Concept for the Haru. The idea is simple and powerful – foldables don’t have much of a direction at the moment… but with the Haru, they do.
Foldable phones have tried for more than 6 years at this point to make their impact. Foldable laptops haven’t even really existed (either because large bending screens are cost-prohibitive or fragile), but the Haru does a fairly good job of giving them a proper application. The idea – your laptop wraps AROUND your bag instead of going inside it. The back is made from faux leather, allowing the laptop (or tablet, rather) to blend into the bag, and the hinge has a fairly wide radius, so no worrying about creases.
If you remember a time not too long ago, Microsoft was working on a single-screen foldable laptop called the Surface Neo. The product got indefinitely delayed before it even launched, and what could have been a fertile testing ground for a perfect proof of concept, remained just a concept. The Haru exists within that conceptual realm, trying to build a case for a large-screen foldable laptop, so that one day the Surface Neo could *maybe* become a reality.
The way you use the Haru is uniquely refreshing. Place your bag on your workspace, un-dock the lid, and open it up to either have yourself a massive wide-screen tablet monitor, or fold it at a cool 60° angle and use it as a laptop with a touchscreen keyboard. The Haru’s strap can be removed from the bag and used as a hanging accessory with the screen while in tablet mode, giving the entire setup a fair bit of versatility. The resulting screen is fairly large too, measuring what I approximate is 24 inches diagonally (if not more)
But alas, one must also address the practical side of a concept too. Aside from the fact that the Haru would be wildly expensive (about as much as a LV or Hermès bag), it also isn’t really worth the cost. The laptop would serve as the outer lid, being fairly vulnerable to bad weather, accidents, or just wear and tear. Unless this thing is built to be extremely robust, a luxury laptop bag (that’s also a laptop) makes little sense. Besides, given how slim it is, you’d have to forego a bunch of ports, fans, and even a proper battery. I still stand by my opinion that this device looks ridiculously cool, and here’s hoping Lenovo or Tecno or TCL ends up building a rough prototype just to show the naysayers at Microsoft how it’s done!
