A knolled clown car for your brain
The whole goal of good carry is to fit as much as possible in as small of space while taking up as little bulk and weight as possible. There are many variables:
- What structure you can create
- How durable the object itself is
- How much protection you can provide
- What affordance you can provide
- The comfort of actually using the object
- Appearance, because fashion matters
- The challenge of manufacturing it in bulk
- The final price for the consumer
Really, this is all a sort of form of communication. You are safely sending some objects from one place to another. You are signifying a certain way of existing to the broader world. When you browse through a pack, objects are organized in a specific way that hopefully makes sense to you.
There are many tensions between all of these variables. You can add more structure & durability, but decrease affordance and increase weight. You can increase protection at the expense of comfort.
And so finding the middle ground is a fine art, but it’s also a school of thought. You’re not going to haul a duffel meant for fieldwork onto an airplane. You’re not going to bring a giant sheet of mil-spec MOLLE into the office. There is always the right tool for the right job.
I’ve been meditating on these tradeoffs ever since I realized I was exploring a bit of a new genre of carry for myself. When I travel, I usually keep a handful of essentials around: lip balm, hand salve, kleenex, AirPods, pen, notebook. When traveling, I add earplugs, melatonin, a Baggu, and an eye shade. And I’m often using different bags for my travel, depending on whether I’m going domestic or international.
It would be much easier to pull out everything I need for a flight in one small bag that can easily fit under the seat. This could be a sling, but it doesn’t have to be. If possible, it should be convertible into a sling or a daypack with the right strap. And so that’s where this comes in. It is the sweet spot, size wise, to carry around as a travel sling all day. It has top straps that can fit carabiniers for a shoulder strap. And the interior is basically a clown car, with four different rows of organization, allowing you to stand objects up, clip them to internal webbing, or lay them down in a zippered pouch. It uses lightweight materials on the interior and is bulky on the exterior, allowing for a balance between protectiveness and ease. Everything collapses internally when you are not using it. And it opens on an angle, allowing for awkwardly-sized items to be wedged into a generously sized diagonal compartment while also presenting the objects in the main compartment in a way that makes immediate sense to you.
I’m saying all of these things not to act as a commercial for this tote, but rather to show how considerately designed some carry has been lately. If this thing were a single brick with an open compartment, it wouldn’t do the right job for anyone. Even if it diagonally opened, that would be a cool trick that would ultimately not matter in most situations. What matters, then, is the structure, this structure, because it is through these constraints that we’re able to work with utility.
Only two faults stick out: the lack of a double zipper to the main compartment; and an awkwardly sized square velcro patch, forcing you to use their own patch system. But those are quibbles, ones that I hope that the creators will resolve in enough time. This piece rules, and more people should learn from what it is trying to tell us, how it is trying to gently constrain new habits upon us.