The Origami is a printer made out of corrugated cardboard. Image: Samsung The cardboard is folded into the exterior of a printer, which houses the engine. Image: Samsung The Clip is a printer that can be manufactured with no screws. Image: Samsung A single piece of plastic can be folded and clipped into place. Image: Samsung The Mate. Image: Samsung The Mate's colored panels can be swapped and snapped into place to create a customizable printer. Image: Samsung

Lately, the future of printing has been all about 3-D. Every day there seems to be a new advancement that is supposed to totally revolutionize the way we live and create things. It’s almost enough to forget that actual printers (Remember those? The old-school kind that spit out ink and paper?) are advancing, too. Designers are still pushing the boundaries of what we can do in the realm of at-home printing, and the ideas they’re coming up with are actually pretty cool.

Take, for instance, three new designs from Samsung that raked in accolades at the 2013 International Design Excellence Awards. The concepts take the guts of a typical at-home printer and stick them into simple, innovative shells. The goal was not to overhaul the core functionality of a printer, but rather to re-imagine its exterior so they become easier to build and more environmentally friendly to dispose of.

>The printer concepts aim to reduce cost.

“It is not easy to apply a cover to a product’s engine unit,” explains Juehyun Jung, a senior designer at Samsung. “In addition to requiring knowledge about the part assembly sequence, there is the inconvenience of fastening a great number of screws.” All three printer concepts—the Clip, Origami and Mate—aim to simplify the manufacturing process and reduce customer cost with their own unique approach.

The first is Clip, a screw-free printer that folds up from a single piece of plastic and locks into place using, you guessed it, clips. The designers replaced the ABS plastic traditionally used in printers with a compressed Polyethylene (the plastic often used in kitchen containers like Tupperware) to ensure that the product could fold up without issue. In just a few steps, manufacturers can take a planar piece of plastic and bend it into a functioning printer, which means fewer parts needed, less time spent constructing the product, and ultimately less money spent by the consumer.

Similarly, the Origami makes use of the folding technique, but it replaces plastic with corrugated cardboard to form the exterior. Principal designer Seungwook Jeong was at donut shop when he realized that retail could learn a few things from how the sweet treats are packaged. He wondered, “What if we put the engine of the printer into a paper box, right in front of the customer, just like the donut shop?” What you get is a minimalistic paper exterior that can be easily recycled once the printer runs it course. In theory, the Origami would reduce cost and waste material, but it's hard to imagine the durability of cardboard would make it a truly sustainable option(Samsung claims the Origami is both fire and water resistant, but chose not to elaborate on the details of the material).

>The designer realized he could learn from how donuts are packaged.

Samsung’s last design update, the Mate, comes with colorful exterior panels that can be swapped out to create a customizable printer. Jeong says the idea for the Mate stemmed from his encounter with a miniature dinosaur papercraft model. “The concept of papercraft, as it comes together, was such a fun experience, he says. "This is how the Mate concept came to life. Transforming a small idea into a product is an example of re-design.” While Samsung's concepts aren't capable of printing new livers or churning out micro versions of yourself, they're certainly a clever update to an otherwise pretty ho-hum office product.

Right now, all are still in the prototype phase, but it's not hard to imagine that with a few minor tweaks something like the Clip or Mate could be on the shelves of your local Best Buy. "There's no barrier for production," Jung says of Clip in particular. "After few engineering problems are solved, it can be offered about 10% cheaper, compared to other products in same segment."