I think you’re on the mark here Dominic. Certainly any innovation is already and could only ever be surrounded by the social practices that then make people wonder how they could’ve done without it. It’s never solely an instrumental thing — good “ideas” are normative, valued assessments. And it’s foolhardy to think that any idea could be absent its lifeblood of social and cultural meaning. That’s what ideas are.

What I’ve found most useful about wheels on luggage is the idea as a resource for provoking and prodding and poking. Finding the ways to help people imagine the world different from it is today, even in small unexpected, below-the-radar sorts of ways. So the story, such as it is, about wheels appearing on luggage is meant to create a small crack in the fortress of doubt that usually surrounds something new, especially when that new thing seems preposterous. It’s a bit of a Jedi mind trick — you can mention wheels on luggage and someone might think..huh..yeah, that’s weird. What *did take ’em so long? Or, to be more contemporary — who would’ve thought that 140 character communication would be the lifeblood of a democratic political uprising in a theocratic militarist Middle East state? That sort of thing. Although — I would like to make a little catalog of wheels-on-luggage things.

I reckon it’s down to curb-cuts, those gently sloped bits of pavement designed to make wheelchairs easier to manage. Once those were ubiquitous, luggage could roll around on small, lightweight wheels, where previously you’d have needed big wheels like those on dollies, to get the luggage up and down curbs.

Some disagreed, though. They felt the crucial factor was the disappearance of porters from train stations and the like—as soon as travellers had to lug their own luggage, they suddenly needed wheels to ease the load. I’m skeptical, because I figure porters disappeared long before wheeled luggage became popular, but fair enough—could be a factor.

The take-away point, though, is that a lot of game-changing innovations, the things that make you wonder how people managed before them, are not stand-alone inventions—they depend on social change like vanishing porters, or environmental change, like the curb cuts. Those future-quotidian designs won’t be independent; they’ll be embedded in a whole system of related designs that create the conditions in which the design will seem obvious and necessary.

Hey, thanks John. Good story in there! I had heard tell that it was partially driven by cabin crews putting the thing together on their own. I have my own imaginary ideas about the innovation being blocked by the Porters lobby and Valet activist who feared people would handle their own luggage. Or a curmudgenly old board member at American Tourister or Samsonite poo-poo’ng the idea like a zealous audiophile insisting that these new “Compact Disks” are a fad, and a objectionable one at that.

I hope it aids your readers a little bit as to where those crazy cases came from.

By the way, I see these four-wheeled cases in every airport I go to nowadays. People wheel them around like show dogs. I prefer the old two-wheeled variety.

regards, John