Fold everything up and put it straight in the bag? Or fold everything into packing cubes first, then put these in?
Not an important dilemma — but useful for thinking about utility and fit.
Packing cubes make it easier to find your stuff. That’s a win for utility. But they make it harder to use space efficiently. That’s a loss of fit.
When you pack directly into the case, clothes can mould to the contours of the bag. With cubes, you’re first fitting clothes into rigid boxes, then trying to fit those boxes into the bag. The bigger the chunks, the less well they fit.
Even cubes designed for your bag add extra cell walls. It’s more work to get everything in.
Why does this matter? Because it’s all about equilibrium. The more options a system has, the better it can settle into a state that fits its surroundings.
Of course, both bags — with cubes and without — are at equilibrium once zipped. But cubes trap the system in a constrained equilibrium: ordered, but with wasted potential (unused space). Without cubes, the system has more freedom to find a messier equilibrium that actually fits better.
And there’s entropy at play: to keep clothes in neat cubes takes extra work. Left free, they tumble into arrangements that fit themselves.
From a regenerative point of view, sometimes it’s worth adding structure — boundaries, hierarchies, rules — to make a system function. But structure always reduces adaptability. Keeping a system in a fixed order takes work, and wastes some of its potential to respond.
So the design question is: when is it worth doing the work to hold things in order, and when is it better to let the system find a looser, but better-fitting arrangement?