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BUSINESS: Kieron-Scott Woodhouse has helped set the mobile phone design world on fire.

HE’S ONLY 23 but already Kieron-Scott Woodhouse has helped set the mobile phone design world on fire.

The final year Middlesex University student has used one of the world’s most beautiful natural ingredients, bamboo, to create a stylish handset for what could soon become one of the trendiest smart- phones on the market.

His mobile handset design -made from four-year-old organically grown bamboo treated for durability - was a hit at last year’s London Design Week.

STYLISH: The bamboo phones

Teaming up with technology entrepreneur, Jerry Lao and a hardware engineer, Woodhouse has helped to create a sexy smart phone, called ADZero.

Available under AD, his and his business partners’ company, the mobile could hit UK independent stores – and others in China - as soon as December this year.
overwhelmed

“I’m overwhelmed,” Wood-house, who is studying for a Bachelors degree in product design, told The Voice. “It’s been a lot of hard work to get it to where it is now. I’m really overwhelmed, really proud of myself. We’re motoring on with what we have to do to get it to market.”

The final year student said it took nearly a year to get the phone to its current phase.

He said he and his business partners experimented with several materials before choosing bamboo. “We don’t want to take a product into production that may have a negative impact on the environment. We wanted to use a material that is extremely efficient to use and is sustainable like bamboo."

“We can produce our materials at very low cost; it’s local to where the factories are. It makes sense to use it. It’s strong and the process that we use has made it just as strong.”

Woodhouse said he has always been attracted to design. One of his earliest memories is building a house on wheels while he was at nursery, he said.
“I must have been about four or five. I remember it was two houses that connected together and I could pull them along,” he recalled.

“I was always taking things apart and putting them back together. I loved (construction toy brand) Lego. I loved drawing. I always had that kind of interest in terms of design. I kind of knew that was what I wanted to go into,” said Woodhouse, who did also art and design at school.

He said he also liked building websites and upgrading his computer himself.
His mother also encouraged him to try new things, he said.

“She is very open minded and very aware of her environment and what’s going on and that is something she passed onto us,” he said. “She is a very strong-minded woman. What she instilled in us as children is to work to do our best at whatever we found interesting."

He added: “She was one of the very first people I showed the phone to and she loved it.”

Woodhouse, from Shepherds Bush in west London, said he designed the handset because he was frustrated by the lack of variety in smart phones already on the market.

Features

Woodhouse’s smart phone includes features such as a camera with ‘ring flash’, a circular photographic flash around the camera’s lens that minimises shadows and makes sure there is even illumination.

“We wanted to change the way people associate with mobile phones,” he said. “We wanted to give an emotive side to the materials that are used. When people feel the mobile phone it’s so unusual and it’s such an unusual texture on something so modern – that’s the kind of emotions we want people to see when they are using our products.”

For more information, visit www.justadzero.com