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"Gravity ruler" luggage scales
By Sam Dunne - Jan 13, 2010
The simplicity of this bungee cord luggage scale, by Politecnico di Milano students Marcella Maltese and Lin Wei, makes you wonder why nobody ever thought of it before. The demand for these things (what with the miserly 15kg allowance on Ryanair flights in Europe and the clumsiness of other similar products) was proven when the pair sold their first batch of 35 in under an hour at the Travel Trading fair in Milan. They're now looking for a manufacturer. Nice packaging design to boot!
Sam Dunne
Sam Dunne is a designer, strategist and writer based in London. Sam is founder of design strategy agency Cohere and Contributing Editor at Core77—reporting broadly on design, technology, food and object culture.
4 Comments
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Nice and simple solution, congrats.
Ignore the envy of all those designers who never got the idea. heheheh :)!Report as spam -
This has been done before with the bungee substituted with a rubber strip. And a note, there are numerous patents for luggage scales so best check around before you invest your tooling dollars. but i do like the simple design!Report as spam
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Fish scale anyone? Nice reapplication, but I agree that the bungee will lose it's accuracy far too quickly.!Report as spam
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One reason that this may not have been done before is that as the rubber ages and dry rots it will become increasingly weaker and inaccurate. These only need to be roughly accurate to be useful by giving the user some idea, but I'd wonder how much these vary over time and temperature. Imaging you left your luggage and scale in the hot car and it is 125 degrees F vs 15F in a cold winter and what about after 3,5,10 years?
That said for marketing reasons i wish i had thought of it.!Report as spam
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