rockland...
If you exchange with Koen some, you will learn that I have an annoying habit of suggesting people should write books about subjects. Here I go again. You really should take your collection of airport furniture photographs and try to organize them, caption them, and connect them with a narrative. It would make a great coffee table book, or even an excellent scholarly inquiry if you have deeper insights to offer. Your concept set off a chain reaction of recollections of airport furniture in me and crystallized something unspoken in me--all transportation terminal furniture is quite fascinating. If you pitch this book idea to a publisher, pitch it as a single book with sections on each form of transportation. Casually note that you have an enormous collection of photos for each transportation type. Then sit back and let the publisher get the brilliant idea of turning this into a series! Be sure to suck up and make him feel like an absolute genius for coming up with the idea. Everyone wants to feel like they contribute something decisive to a great idea. My scientist father-in-law got an enormous science institute building built on the campus of a major university by inviting the chancellor to lunch to talk about some bureaucratic issues and letting the chancellor get the brilliant idea that what the school needed was a new institute in his field. Giving others an enormous sense of credit virtually ensures action. 🙂
DC - Are you SURE we can't just genetically re-engineer our hips and shoulders?
That might be easier than solving the problem from the other direction.
Humans have been walking upright and carrying things for a long time; we've sorta figured out how to do it. Babies are carried in slings close to their mothers' chests, water jugs are balanced on a woman's head, two bags are carried by hanging them on the ends of a pole slung across a man's shoulders, police officers carry their gear on their belt, soldiers and students and hikers carry theirs in a backpack/rucksack.
If we only wanted to make it easy for travelers to carry their luggage with minimal physical strain, we'd give them backpacks, or invent a padded shoulder-mounted frame from which they could hang their bags, or provide their bags with shoulder straps that crossed the body, etc.
Unfortunately, there are conflicting requirements. A bag held close to the front of the body doesn't work for a traveler who wants to stride confidently toward you and give you a firm handshake. A backpack doesn't work for anyone wearing a suit. Any solution that requires multiple bags to balance each other makes the traveler look like one of those servants you originally mentioned.
Perhaps we could approach the problem a different way: You're concerned with the intermittent requirement to carry luggage that normally rolls. Under what circumstances is that carrying necessary? Is it possible to eliminate the need altogether, or to meet it in some way other than by lifting and carrying?
Fair question...
I carry my bag up escalators when I am running when the airline has made me late for my connecting flight, or late to get down escalators to ground transportation for my meetings.
I carry my bag across rain gutters full of water.
I carry my bag when I travel to rural areas, or third world areas, when it is raining and I am not on pavement (often).
I carry my suitcase when I am running after a pick pocket I wish to swing my bag at and knock unconscious. 🙂
I carry my bag when I am confronted by driveways covered with snow.
I carry my bag in the airplane and up and down the stairways on the tarmac to the airplane.
I carry my bag in person's homes when I have been dragging the rollers through slushy muck before entering their home with the cream colored carpets.
This list is hardly exhaustive.
Normie...
You seem a poster child for what is wrong with design right now. I am doing some of your market research for you and you want me to use UPS. Gotcha.
You are like so many designers today, only in caricature.
I want an exciting looking, comfortable chair. They give me explorations in form and materials.
I want a frying pan that that does not stick. They give me surfaces that flake and poison me in two years.
I want a coffee pot that is fast, simple, makes great coffee, and is a snap to clean. They give me polished steel monoliths that hog my counter space, make lousy coffee, and have digital read outs.
I want an electric car that does not pollute my world, even though the world is now overflowing with more petroleum than ever before because of new exploration technology and because much oil is now proven to be generated abiotically in the upper mantel and lower crust. They give me all kinds of compromises like hybrids, diesels, fuel cells, any kind of compromise they can think of so long as it helps to perpetuate their oligopoly and its sunk costs...but not an electric car, which they can't control with proprietary fuel delivery systems and can't acquire the power grids all over the world to control...yet.
I want computers that are not selling out my identity, but they give me compromises that sell out my identity with the illusion of security.
I want voting machines that elect officials by popular vote, but they give me hackable voting machines that allow pre-selected candidates.
I want vaccuum cleaners that don't break my ear drums and clean the carpet. They give me noisy pieces of shit that grab the big stuff, break in two years, and look like post modern Star Wars sump pumps (the Dyson).
I want buildings that don't leak and that constantly help me know where I am inside them and orient me to how to get to where I want to go. I get leaking pieces of shit that explore form and textures and intentionally make me feel insignificant.
I want designers that want to design me a better functioning world. They give me, well, they give me you.
If you don't like my idea of a concavity as a solution to keeping luggage from banging on one's hip(and I would hope you could come up with something better because you are a trained designer, aren't you?), then come up with it. Or be silent. Don't be a digitized fop and suggest an inane solution that doesn't solve anything.
Now, Normie, repeat after me: Rome was not built in a day of onanism.
You da man, Normie.
Solve a problem for civilization. If not mine with luggage, then something else.
For old time's sake, Normie.
PS:
I will sacrifice a goat (in effigy) to the first person who can design a truly functional piece of luggage. After 20 years and hundreds of flights, I've yet to find a case that carries well and rolls efficiently when I am too tired to haul. I've come to think of good luggage as a kind of utopian ideal. Lofty to consider, exciting to try, but ultimately fatalistic.
Olive...
800 in only one category? 🙂
Great to hear from you down New Mexico way. You are entering the seasons that make people love it there.
Regarding cast iron skillets, I am a Griswoldian, all pre-1930s and meticulously collected over a period of years. Each morning, I kneel and pray toward Erie, PA. In fact, I am re-seasoning one today.
Been there with coffee presses. They make the best coffee, but...I tired of cleaning them and I tired of the occassional, gritty overflow and of boiling in one device and brewing in another. And, well, you get the idea. I only have time for two or three religious rituals in the morning, and kneeling towards Erie, my Eggs Mendel (a lightly fried egg over easy with chopped shallots and large curd cottage cheese barely melted on top), plus the skillful, lavishing of affections upon my exquisite, but high maintenance wife, leaves me in need of a coffee pot that does it all for me.
Now if I were married to an exquisite and low maintenance dame like yourself, I would of course have time for the coffee press and no need for a utopian coffee pot. But such is not the case. 🙂
A broom I leave to the help.
So: despite the impeccable wisdom you possess, I must continue my quixotic quest for luggage that does not bang my hip.
Enjoy the peppers.
PS Olive...
Do you ever watch Boston Legal?
I remain rather fond of it. I identify with all the characters in one way or another, but am particularly enamored with the quaternity of Allen and Denny, and Shirley and Denise.
In the spirit of Allen Shore lusting after the part of you that is Denise, I actually do wonder if you are a former wearer of girl's uniforms with knee high socks and I really would, just between you and me of course, like to see you lounging naked from the waist down in your favorite mid century modern chair.
To the part of you that is wise, insightful, post Ivan, and fully contained Shirl, well, I'll dress up in a bunny outfit, if you will. 🙂
But I digress, Shirl, er, Denise, er, Olive. 🙂
Now, the part of me that is Denny, old and riddled with Mad Cow, must have his Ashton and Glennfiddich on the balcony with the part of me that is ever Allen and drink a toast to friendship, if you catch my chivalrous drift?
Ummmmmmm......
Well, I am enjoying the chilis, made some NM Green Chili Stew this weekend to ward off the chilly nights, but the rest of it all leaves me befuddled...not much of a TV watcher and William Shatner's mere existence irritates the heck out of me.
Additionally, I don't see myself ever lounging in a state of dishabile, I'm more of a T-shirt and sweat-pants kind of lounger. Definitely a low maintenance girl, and, since I AM the help, I use a broom.
Would love a high-tech functional suitcase though...really I would...
You are a classy dame...
Almost no one else would have taken that in the spirit it was intended.
Thank you for not leaping to wrong conclusions.
Judge Roy Bean had Miss Lily Langtree and I have Miss Olive.
Take your hats off in the presence of the lady's portrait, gentlemen, or I'll have to hang you all. 🙂
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