v-2.org

If you're anywhere within five years or so of my age, you probably remember the old American Express ads, which hinged on the proposition that the charge card was the one truly indispensable travel tool. The approach varied across the long series, but the high point of each ad was always the moment at which stentorian spokesactor Karl Malden advised/ordered the viewer not to "leave home without it."

Times, of course, have moved on. I'd wager that relatively few of us are inclined to let some pugnacious shill in a fedora push us around like that. But it remains an interesting question: what do you dare not leave home without? And how might your answer vary with the anticipated distance and duration of your travels?

Ever since a presentation I saw some ethnographers from Intel give at Ubicomp in Tokyo last year, I've increasingly been thinking about questions like these in terms of "mobile kits," and the urban infrastructures to which the components of same afford access.

The ethnographers' interest was in understanding that subset of the things we carry on a daily basis with the primary intention of mediating between our needs and desires and the various technical systems capable of fulfilling them. At least for the relatively privileged and globalized cohort the Intel research focused on, this amounted to a very few near-universals: house keys, car key or transit pass, ATM and credit cards, mobile phone.

And it should surprise nobody - least of all Intel, right? - that these objects are all at most the physical tokens of transactions that are increasingly become digital. As Uncle Marsh might have put it, they're all well on their way to being "angelized," desubstantiated and diffused throughout the environment. Between RFID, universal wireless Internet access, and the various kinds of biometric-signature recognition and identity verification becoming available, it's hard to imagine that the negotiation we now inscribe in a house key or a transit pass need reside in crude matter for terribly much longer.

But what about that large set of daily essentials we tote along with us that do not refer to some virtual transaction? As interested as I am in ensuring that the latter are imagined and executed with an appropriate degree of finesse, I'm still more interested in equipping myself for the implacable demands of the actual. And that requires good gear: thoughtfully designed, functional objects that allow me to live my life happily, comfortably, and in a manner as near to frictionless as is practically achievable.

Here are some things I rarely leave the house without anymore:

Titanium Inka pen

It is certainly arguable that most of the things we do with pens - communication, annotation and the verification of identity - will be among the first to disappear into the instrumented woodwork. In the meantime, though, it sure is nice to have one handy at all times.

Over the years, quite a few manufacturers have attempted to address this need, searching for the sweet spot where durability, convenience, ease of use and styling converge. And as such efforts go, the Inka is a pretty sound offering - especially in its superlight titanium version, which weighs in at a thoroughly ridiculous 12.75 grams.

In both aluminum and titanium versions, the Inka is a dual-mode device: both a bare-minimum carbon fiber ballpoint some 7 cm long, and a more-nearly-fullsize 13 cm pen to which it can be converted. Those few centimeters contain a pressurized cartridge that, at least in theory, affords writing in any combination of temperature, atmospheric pressure, and humidity you care to devise. It's clearly envisioned as being the kind of reliable, low-maintenance tool you can clip to your rucksack (or whatever) and safely forget about until the moment you need it.

The trouble is that the "quick-use" configuration really isn't suitable for any act of inscription much more involved than scrawling a quick postcard. (Remember those?) And converting the Inka from one mode into the other requires nothing less than a procedure that takes me, anyway, about ten seconds, all told:

1. Unscrew pen tube from keyring
2. Remove inner quick-use pen
3. Unscrew endcap
4. Screw pen into shaft
5. Replace endcap

There are other frustrations. Despite the pressurization, the Inka still seems to be subject to the same inherent frailty of other ballpoints I've used, which is that it occasionally has trouble getting started on a line; I think it's a revenge effect, something to do with the particular formulation of gel ink required by the pressurization. For those that care about such things, as well, I duly note that a mere few months' use in thoroughly ordinary environments has left the Inka's titanium shell looking a bit tawdry.

In all honesty, for all of its canny and thoughtful engineering, as an object the Inka falls short of the high (aesthetic and utilitarian) standard set by the collapsible version of Fisher's Space Pen; if the latter came with a keyring, I'd probably carry that as my everyday pen of choice. So why have I grown so attached to the Inka?

Because there is that whole "design dissolving in behavior" thing to consider, and here the Inka truly excels. It does come so equipped, it does live weightlessly and thoughtlessly on my right hip, and I'm able to respond to all of those situations in which life presents me with the sudden (and ordinarily frantic) need for a writing implement with a lovely, almost Bondian gesture. Maximum kudos: this one's a keeper.

ABITAX 0510 tag light

Similar praise should be directed at this miniscule keyfob flashlight. It's not as if there aren't five million such lights on the market, of course - each responding to the boundary conditions of durability, long battery life, and reasonably high luminance, and each managing to present a credible alternative. But this one's been executed with more than usual flair.

It's thoughtfully styled. Its clearly-knurled, easy-to-find-in-the-dark switch allows both pulsed and persistent illumination. It's bright. And above all, tiny enough to clip unnoticeably onto a zipper fob (or, indeed, onto the same keyring from which depends my Inka), it doesn't suffer from the dorky, A/V Club aura that so many of these lights project. Between these two objects and the extremely small and elegant utility knife I carry when not subject to inspection by the good folks of Homeland Sicherheit, I feel particularly well-equipped for the wide variety of hassles and challenges daily life is so good at providing us with.

Puma TRAINAWAY jacket, shirt and shorts

The wallpaper*esque conceit here is that keeping in shape presents the intrepid glomad with some particular challenges. As the TRAINAWAY site suggests, "Going for a run while on a trip can seem downright impossible. Let's face it, who really has the time and energy to pack bulky training gear, plan a manageable running route in an unfamiliar place, and do all the other things necessary to keep fit while on the road?"

There happens to be some merit in this proposition, which is to say that it's not (just) a neatly ginned-up problem/solution devised to shift units. I face this precise problem every time I pack for a few weeks away: my maintenance of anything even remotely resembling fitness and emotional stability depends vitally on my being able to run or swim laps on a regular basis, and yet, in the interest of maximum efficiency I tend to eschew checking luggage. I have a legitimate need for a suite of training gear that packs light, that washes clean in a hotel sink and that drips dry in a very few hours. The TRAINAWAY gear does an admirable job of responding to these needs.

But while I can absolutely vouch for the truth of the next challenge expressed in the promo copy ("[m]ost often, even the best intentions result in gear that's left idle, never making its way out of the suitcase"), this issue seems to be one that's fundamentally beyond the ability of a product designer to affect. I'm not sure there's any sufficiently magical aspect of the TRAINAWAY products in and of themselves to provide a countervailing tendency.

What we have here is, for better or worse, "just" a collection of exceptionally nicely designed running togs. The silkysmooth, lightweight, nonchafing fabrics spec'd for the shirt and shorts really are state of the art, permitting that all-important Mean Sink-to-Suitcase Interval to be cut down to a mere six hours. And the way the jacket packs everything together into one integrated bundle is neat, if not actually all that essential. (What, you've never heard of stuff sacks?)

I opted to forgo the shoes, for a couple of reasons. I already have a favorite pair of ultra-lightweight trainers, for starters, but there are also a few details of the Puma offering that I simply didn't like - primarily the styling and biomechanics, both of which are surprisingly clunky, and fuel my suspicion that the shoe was not actually designed by runners/for runners.

This suspicion is further exacerbated by the outboard slot for storage of your hotel's cardkey. Interestingly enough, this latter feature strikes me as the kind of blunder that only a self-conscious "experience" designer would make, or have introduced into the product development process. Anyone who actually runs - or, I would argue, even most nonrunners who spend a few minutes contemplating the question - will have a vivid sense for how rapidly and thoroughly this slot is going to be gunked up with the vile muck of street path and trail. Given every possibility offered by an integrated collection, why on earth choose the bottom of the shoe for storage?

This silliness aside, one of the things I like best about TRAINAWAY is that it's clearly been conceived not even as an integrated system of products but as an experience, even - you should forgive the expression - a service/experience ecology. When you purchase gear from the TRAINAWAY collection, see, you receive one of four cardkey-sized, plasticized route maps (for Tiergarten, the Bois de Boulogne, Hyde or Central Park), along with a unique code that allows you to download mp3 audio running guides keyed to same. There are apparently other components in the works as well.

On its face, this seems like a nice idea, and one that appears to support the product's assertion that it reduces the complexity and hassle of keeping fit on the road. The trouble is that service ecologies are such delicate things, the delivery of the intended experience depending vitally on the smooth coordination of heterogeneous and inherently unstable components. Puma's partnered with Soundwalk ("for people who don't normally take audio tours"!) to provide the audio guides, and that seems like a defensible move. But not every partnering is so easy to justify.

Case in point: W Hotels. W Hotels? The chain is years past its sell-by date as far as hipness goes, and what's worse for Puma's attempts to stay on-brand with the messaging, the unmotivated, undertrained desk staff at a W can be relied upon to have absolutely no idea what if anything the TRAINAWAY deal requires of them. For all the effort that's gone into devising them, then, the extramaterial aspects of the TRAINAWAY experience are all but completely irrelevant to me. What I'm left with is a jacket, a shirt and a pair of shorts. Happily, I quite like those.

Bottom line: the audio guides are the kind of thing you listen to once, at most. A map of the Tiergarten does me little good should my travels happen to take me to Manila or Buenos Aires. And it would take some pretty heavy incentivizing to get me to stay at a W again. But the gear itself succeeds in its fundamental ambition, which is to (however incrementally) increase the chance that I will manage to squeeze a much-needed run into an overscheduled few days abroad. In fact, it's already packed in my bag for my trip to Tokyo next week.

Mojo Titan refillable lipstick/lip balm unit

The last of the "tools" I'm sharing with you today is a trifle different. Of all things, it's a line of lipcare products and the dispenser unit specially designed to showcase them, and you truly don't get much more analog than that.

Big huh, right? Well, there's a backstory here. Like many of you, perhaps, for much of the year some kind of lip treatment is a frank daily necessity for me. Whether it's because I'm taking too much UV on my runs or spending too much time in the harsh, denatured air of airliner cabins, my lips aren't particularly happy with me. They crack. They hurt. They don't look all that great.

Despite this discomfort, this is just not something that I've historically spent a whole hell of a lot of time worrying about. Mostly I just suffered/ignored what was going on - maybe I even patted myself on the back a little bit for my stoicism, and (to paraphrase something Neal Stephenson once wrote) for being the kind of person too busy living my life to care much about what was happening to my skin.

And then I entered my late thirties. It's a time at which many small signs converge to remind you, in no uncertain terms, that though life may be good and it may be sweet, it is very definitely a one-way trip. I know I need't go into detail, here, but you may be certain that what was and is happening to my lips is part of a more general syndrome. And part of the nature of this syndrome is that Attention Must Be Paid to many things that have hitherto been quite happily neglected.

The issue here is that, as anyone who knows me knows well, I'm just not the kind of person who's gonna tote around a rust-flecked yellow tin of Carmex or a greasy plastic tube of Chapstick. It's snobbery, pure and simple: these objects offend me. I do not, cannot and will not derive aesthetic satisfaction from them, and therefore I will likely neither buy them, nor should I be compelled by circumstance to buy them, actually remember to bring them with me.

Is this stupid? Sure it is. Is it also true? You bet. So I was intrigued when I saw something called the Mojo Titan show up on Core77's Bullitts, and thrilled when the designer/manufacturer kindly offered to send me a Titan for review.

The Titan is, quite simply, the most ludicrously over-engineered personal beauty product I've ever seen or heard tell of - and I mean that as the highest praise. It's a discreet, pocket-sized cylinder, with a thoroughly appropriate warmth and heft in the hand, that shelters at its core a refillable munition of super-premium lip balm. (Bio girls, transgirls, drag queens, goths, silent-film stars and other boys who wear same should note that the Titan can also be loaded with cartridges of equally premium lipstick.) I ask you: how many products in the health and beauty domain can claim to be "heat-tempered aerospace-grade alloy (aluminum, titanium, manganese, magnesium), YAG laser etched, four-axis CNC-machined"? It's awesome.

Let me now admit that I carry my Titan everywhere, and get a great deal of pleasure and amusement out of each of the several occasions daily on which I use it. The pleasure starts with the object itself, especially the haptics involved in replacing the top half of the tube. Whether intentionally or not, the inside of the upper piece is finely scored, which makes a very subtle but highly satisfying "zip" sound/feel when screwing it back on. This level of precision crafting far exceeds, say, that devoted to a mere survival knife.

But the packaging, sumptuous as it is, is just a bagatelle; the real value proposition here is the product. I can't speak for the lipstick, but without question, Mojo ships the best lip balm I've ever tried. The botanically-formulated, all-natural balm offers persistent moisturization without being gloppy, and finishes with a subtle eucalyptusy/pepperminty tingle. I'm hooked. My lips have never been happier.

Now, the quibbles:

- There's something a little off on the form factor, at least if it was intended to carry through the ultracontemporary messaging implied by everything else in the presentation. The dimensions (i.e. reduction in tube diameter toward the top) and especially the flared carry-ring stanchion reinforce an almost Victorian aura. As a result, the Titan misses the jetrosexual mark it's so obviously aiming for by just that much...but you know what Mies said about God and the details.

- Observationally: many, many men don't have the slightest idea how to use a beveled lipstick, having not been trained since early childhood in the art of applying same. And what's more, some feel awkward about using something so heavily gender-coded as "female" in public - this is admittedly silly and something to get over, but true nonetheless. For both reasons, then, I'd argue that a unisex product like lipbalm should default to the flat-tipped form of a Chapstick.

Would I have paid full retail price for the Titan? Probably not; as cool as it is, it's admittedly kind of indefensible. But you can bet I'll be back for more of the balm. It is, not the slightest question, something I no longer care to leave home without.