Tube Grip: An Inflatable Shopping Assistant
When looking at design as a utilitarian problem-solving tool, the smartest solutions are often the simplest ones. That’s certainly the case with Tube Grip – a compact inflatable grip-assistant designed to alleviate the pressure heavy shopping bags place on hands by applying basic physics with a bit of everyday ingenuity.
The air-filled polyvinyl chloride strip takes advantage of the simple physics principle that the wider the surface area, the more distributed and thus the lighter the pressure. Created by South-Korean product design student duo Hyo-eun Kim and Eun-seok Kim, Tube Grip won a 2010 IF Concept Award in the Universal Design category.
Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, Design Observer and Huffington Post, and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.
