Week 3 Session: The Trolley
The wheel that pulls left is not broken. A trolley that tracked straight would let you leave in a straight line — this one keeps you circling, and calls the circling browsing
8 March 2027
Before the session#
Push an empty trolley in a straight line for ten metres. Note what your arms do.
In the session#
The trolley is the course’s first prosthesis: a wheeled extension of the shopper’s body, built with just enough failure in it to keep that body moving past shelves it hadn’t planned to see. This is containment dressed as convenience. We look at the wheel geometry, the basket-to-cart escalation, and the moment a trolley stops being a container and starts being a leash.
Afterwards#
The next four weeks stay inside the store’s engineered failures — the trolley is the first, not the worst.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you can describe the trolley's default drift, left or right, without pushing one
- you can say what a trolley that tracked perfectly straight would cost the store per aisle
- you can name one way your body already compensates for the drift without deciding to
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor