Belle Magazine. Date. Generation Next: The Folding World of Enlai Hooi, By Emma Lieutenant Maher.

Sitting across the bar from designer Enlai Hooi, I am immediately awed by his intelligence. Within a few minutes of talking to Hooi, I can appreciate why his work has received such acclaim. Aged a mere 21, Hooi dances around the bar with the youthfulness of a teenage boy and then leads straight into a conversation that leaves you wondering how someone of his age is so ingenious. Hooi's work is complex, technologically innovative and visually powerful. What begins with a rough "crumple" -Hooi demonstrates with a piece of paper- is unfolded and develops into a more regimented cellular piece. Once complete, his folded paper screens resemble the complexity of origami.

In August 2000, Hooi won The Sydney Morning Herald Young Designer of the Year Award. Shortly after, he opened his first solo exhibition at Vis Bar in Melbourne. This led to another exhibition entitled Experiments in Folding at the Kirketon Hotel, Sydney. Hooi displayed screens that were developed "in response to the prevalence of open-plan, neo-modern architecture in Australia. The interchangeable screens allow spaces to be manipulated within domestic and office environments," he explains.

Before Hooi know what the term meant, he was designing things. "I didn't really decide to become a designer. It made itself clear when I was about three or four. The funny thing is, as a child I never knew what design was but I was always designing". It is always interesting to know what ticks in a designer's mind, what inspires and what intrigues. According to Hooi: "Everything does. Nature inspires me, but then a lot of manmade things inspire me more. Every waking hour, you are attuned to picking up things, to picking up design devices, to noticing things behaving in interesting ways. You don't clock on say, 'Now I'm looking for things'. It just happens. You go to sleep thinking about design and you wake up thinking about design.

Hooi thinks constantly. So much so that during conversation, he will go off on a tangent and then ask to be reminded where he was up to. He analyses the design process and sheds light on what he believes is influencing design. He defines design as being "the composition of ideas in form. What a good designer does is eloquently compose ideas. I don't think you can see design as a single entity. Technology influences design. When something new is brought out, designers will play with it. But I think the idea that design is as much about human experience as anything else is coming through."…