Tae Kim is the owner of Alite designs, and he’s one of the few outdoor equipment designers in the world, and he’s designing for camping noobs. He’s aiming his designs at the people who are interested in camping, but don’t have a great deal of knowledge about the outdoors. The big idea that most outdoor equipment companies are marketing is one of hardcore outdoorsyness, but there are a lot of people who aren’t interested in climbing Everest, they just want to go out into the woods for a weekend once a year. Personally, I’m past that point. I work at a summer camp in northern Michigan where we go on trips to somewhat remote locations, so I have experiance doing a little more than going out in the woods for a night or two. Out of Tae Kim’s talk, the idea that struck me the most was that of a lending library for camping equipment. I had the chance to go backpacking last year, with camp. It was a great time and I’d like to do it again, but it requires a lot of special equipment that I don’t own. If I’m only going to go backpacking once or twice, it doesn’t make sense for me to buy the equipment, so if I could rent it from a company like Alite, that would be really useful.
Out of the designs that Alite has, I like the Squirrel Mini Pack a whole lot. I’m not sure what I would use it for, but it’s cool. Maybe it would work for a walking around camp backpack?
I’ve seen other chairs like this, with only two feet, but most of them don’t have backs and don’t look as comfortable as the Monarch chair does.
All of this makes me really interested in designing camping gear, as an industrial designer. Do you know of any camping gear that’s pretty good looking?