What good is an archive if you can’t go through it now and again to show off your old school/original gangster designs to your friends and family? To demonstrate that our wood-shedding from years past can stoke today’s design trends, we present to you Back in the D-A-Y.

In the late ‘90s we teamed up with Kensington to create a smarter surge protector/socket system. In an ever-growing sea of beige cords and power strips, Astro took the lead and introduced a new and innovative color-coded system for cables and sockets. By supplying the user with a color-coded surge protector replete with colored piping around the sockets and adhesive colored tags to mark your cords, The Kensington SmartSocket eliminated the unsafe practice of randomly tugging on cables to determine which cord was plugged into which socket. The power button was recessed eliminating data loss by a random fat thumb or big toe. The sockets themselves were set wider apart to accommodate for the latest high-tech power-supply needs. By no means did we come up with a cure for the common cold, but we did stay true to the organizational thirst of the cable-needy consumer, and mandatorily apply such practices today. Green Plug Anyone?

The SmartSocket was awarded an IDSA/Business Week Design Of The Decade Bronze in 1999.