OVERVIEW
Porter is a luggage drone that securely transports belongings within an autonomous transit system. It is a speculative work of fiction imagining how the luggage experience might evolve in a highly-automated future.
TEAM
Solo project
TIMELINE
5 months
SKILLS
Industrial design, product strategy, graphic design, branding, journey mapping, fiction writing, storyboarding, sketching, 3D prototyping
CONTEXT
MFA Products of Design,School of Visual Arts
For the common traveler, luggage is cumbersome, costly, and frustrating to handle amid the chaos of long-distance travel.
Luckily, the coming age of shared, autonomous mobility brings with it a new opportunity to reimagine luggage’s role in the travel experience.
Porter eliminates the need to handle your luggage during travel.
In a future where personal vehicles are highly specialized, like trains with separate cars for baggage and passengers, Porter behaves like one’s personal travel concierge, transporting your belongings securely and seamlessly from point to point.
Like a delivery drone in reverse, Porter meets you at your point of departure to load your belongings. It then travels autonomously via carrier vehicle to an airport or train station, boards, departs, and repeats the process until it meets you at your final destination.
Luggage evolves when travel evolves. The days of trains and ocean liners saw the use of steamer trunks, for example, while the jet age necessitated smaller, lighter, hand-held suitcases.
To better understand the utility and variations of luggage, I looked at travelers in unique circumstances and studied how they transported belongings.
The common luggage experience requires multiple operations and strangers handling one's belongings.
“How might we redesign the experience and utility
of luggage in a shared, autonomous future?”
To put myself in a future-framed headspace, I invented a fictional newspaper from the year 2060 and wrote several stories about life in the shared, autonomous age.
I got physical, prototyping quick-and-dirty cardboard ideas of futurist luggage forms and features. I then sought feedback from other designers.
I took inspiration from war machines, bell hop trolleys, and martian rovers.
Later, I sketched fast and loose form explorations, whittling them down to a single concept.
I drew rough but detailed drawings of the frame dimensions, tread mechanism, and sprocket assembly.
The wing bumpers were routed from ¾in. MDF on a CNC machine, while the core box was cut from ½in. plywood, nailed together, and sheathed in aluminum.
I used the Law of Cosines and some basic geometry to rough out the angles on my sprockets. I then laser cut 16 copies plus 1 prototype from ¼in. acrylic.
I laser cut and hand colored 400 MDF treads, then sourced 1,600 nuts and bolts and 14ft. of black single-speed bicycle chains.
Then, I hand screwed each tread to two parallel bike chains (400 treads in total, 2 nuts and bolts each) for two fully-articulating tank treads.
I printed custom branding for key areas of the body then assembled the axels, sprockets, and treads, completing the prototype.
Porter measures roughly 3.5 x 2.5 x 2 ft long, with an aluminum body and articulating treads on either side. The interior capacity fits standard-sized carry-on luggage.
In 1596, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “luggage”, literally meaning “inconvenient, heavy baggage” and deriving from the verb “lug”, or “to pull laboriously”.
But travel shouldn’t be laborious; it should be wonderful.
The world is now more connected than ever, and travel ought to be joyful and adventurous instead of frustrating and difficult. Porter is the travel experience, joyfully reimagined for a more connected age.