EDC used to mean something very specific. Ask any survival enthusiast and they’ll tell you it stands for EveryDay Carry, the essential tools you keep on hand at all times. A Swiss Army knife. A multi-tool. A compact flashlight. Things built for the unpredictable, the inconvenient, and the emergency. The whole point was physical survival, and the design language to match: rugged, matte, built to last.
Then designer Juhyeon Kwon asked a pretty sharp question: what does survival actually look like today? The answer, apparently, is a 3% battery warning which may eventually lead to FOMO (fear of missing out), digital version.
Designer: Juhyeon Kwon
Kwon’s EDC concept takes the abbreviation and flips it into something that feels truer to how we actually live now: EveryDay Charge. Because whether we want to admit it or not, keeping our devices powered has become just as critical as anything a Swiss Army knife ever solved. You need your phone to navigate, communicate, work, bank, and basically exist in modern life. A dead battery isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a full stop. And unlike the emergencies that a multi-tool was built for, this one happens every single day.
That said, Kwon didn’t just design a portable charger and call it done. The proposal imagines one that looks like a tiny creature you’d want to clip to your bag and take everywhere. The EDC charger concept takes the form of a small caterpillar-like character: a round, bulbous head with sleepy eyes and a little round mouth, perched on top of a segmented body made of plump stacked rings.
There’s a metal loop at the top so it can hang from a bag or keychain, and the cable wraps neatly around those body segments when not in use. The USB-C port sits at the base, tucked cleanly under the soft silicone form. It’s part functional device, part desktop toy, part bag charm, and it somehow makes all of that feel intentional rather than gimmicky.
The cable management alone is worth paying attention to. Cord clutter is one of those low-key annoyances that no one talks about enough, and the segmented body of the EDC makes the solution almost automatic. You just wind the cable around and let the rings hold it in place. It’s clever without being complicated, which is the hallmark of good design.
What really sells the concept, though, is the character. The face gives the EDC a presence that most tech accessories completely lack. It’s expressive in a way that feels pulled from the world of collectible figures and character design, sitting somewhere between a Studio Ghibli creature and a designer toy you’d find in a boutique concept store. It doesn’t feel out of place next to the kind of objects people deliberately choose to surround themselves with. It feels like it belongs in that company.
The proposed colorways extend that collectible energy further. The Lime version is probably the most striking, with that acid green being the kind of color that photographs well and catches eyes in person. The Coral and Dark Purple variants round out the lineup with personalities of their own, and the packaging design plays into the whole aesthetic too: illustrated faces printed across the boxes, each one different, like a small cast of characters rather than just another product line.
What Kwon has captured with this concept is something that product designers rarely get exactly right: the idea that an object can be genuinely useful and genuinely desirable at the same time. Not useful despite being cute, or cute despite being functional. Both, fully, without compromise.
It also reflects something real about how people relate to their things now. There’s a growing appetite for objects that carry personality, that feel like they were chosen rather than just purchased out of necessity. Your charger used to be something you stuffed in the bottom of your bag and forgot about. The EDC is the kind of thing you’d clip to the outside of your bag on purpose. That’s the shift. Survival looks different now, and if this concept ever makes it to production, it comes with a face.
