Outdoor enthusiasts everywhere are only too aware of the hassle of taking along a boat on a camping trip. While easy to stow on the roof of a car, carrying it is another thing. While it’s not the trickiest thing in the world, it can be annoying when you’ve got packs filled with loads of other stuff and the water isn’t so close to the car.

A new project from designers Arno Mathies & Max Frommeld might make transporting boats a bit easier. Their project, the Fold-a-boat, is a seamless, hard shell, folding boat made from one single sheet of plastic. The boat is made for flat water, so yes, that means no wild rapids, waves, or drops. If you took this boat on any of those, you would be soaked and the thing would be wrecked. It’s best to stick to protected coves, quiet lakes and smooth rivers.

Since it’s made of a single sheet of plastic, and can be folded and packed into a small 150cm x 60cm parcel, this makes it not only an ideal candidate for camping, but also for the shelves of your local IKEA store. Marked by how easy it is to assemble, the question is if it will also be of questionable quality. The designers suggest a secondary market could be applications for NGO’s responding quickly to natural disasters. Not sure if the boat is up for that sort of thing, but there’s no doubt it will appeal to campers looking to minimize their packs and the amount of crap they have to carry. No word on how much the Fold-a-boat would cost if manufactured.

Via Yanko Design.