Wheelchair users cannot bring their personal wheelchairs onto airplanes. Instead they must check them as luggage, a logistics hassle that means they must be transported onto and off of the airplane in an additional wheelchair provided by the airport. It also leaves the risk that the personal wheelchair will be damaged or worse, lost in transit.
Andrea Mocellin, a Munich-based transportation designer who’s worked on everything from cars to jets, learned of this inconvenience. He subsequently designed this Revolve wheelchair, which can be folded down to fit into the overhead bin on an airplane:
“I started with the development of the folding wheel, which I personally financed and prototyped over several years of tests and trials,” Mocellin writes. “The resulting foldable wheelchair [can make] a significant impact on the lives of people with mobility impairments, providing them with greater freedom and flexibility when traveling by air.”
Mocellin founded a company, Revolve, to commercialize the design, and it was successfully crowdfunded last year; however, the campaign was subsequently canceled, in order for the company to “explore different avenues to offer our product to the world.”
At press time the company’s website was still active, but offers little more than a product description and a contact button, with no mention of production plans. Just a reminder that industrial design is always lashed to the complexities of the business world.
