The standard upright bicycle has looked almost exactly the same for over a century, for very good reason. The basic diamond-frame design is very close to perfect. A derailed-chain drivetrain can exceed 98% efficiency, is cheap to build and is trivially easy to repair and maintain. I love folders, I love recumbents, I love full-sus mountain bikes, but for 99% of riders and 99% of journeys, precious little has changed since the baby boom.
There have been four meaningful breakthroughs in bicycle design in the last fifty or so years. Shimano's indexed derailer gears, Rohloff's SpeedHub, Mike Burrows' Compact Geometry and Andrew Ritchie's Brompton Bicycle. All of them were painstaking developments that took years of work. Burrows' Compact Geometry is a change as trivial as sloping the top tube on a standard frame, but it took years to get right.
I see dozens of these bicycle design concepts every year and every single one I have seen has been absolutely terrible. In the case of this design, the wheels would be so lacking in lateral stiffness as to make the bicycle frightening to ride and the epicyclic rear wheel would be lucky to go ten miles before self-destructing on road debris. Won't work, never will work, never should have been committed to paper.
The designer had seemingly no interest in the century of development behind the modern bicycle and no inclination to investigate why the status quo is as it is. He bumbled in and designed something cool-looking but useless, because he obviously has no interest in such trivia as the laws of physics. Personally, I think that these bicycle concepts embody the antithesis of good design - a useless, style-led attitude that rarely leads to anything but last year's model wearing this year's tailfins.
If you want to design table lamps and dribbly teapots, keep churning out this hogwash. If you want to change the world, start designing with your brain, not your felt tip pens. The world is full of vital, urgent, life-or-death design problems, but they need substance, not style.
I can't tell if you're saying that bicycle design is a 'solved problem' or if everything that can be invented has already been invented. Either one is a perfectly valid excuse for not looking at anything in an entirely different way, I suppose. People thought that fire solved all their energy needs for thousands of years, right?
Though the seat does look a little far off the center of gravity to me.
I think he's saying that the designer should've started off with understanding why the components of the modern bicycle exist in their current form, in order to more effectively find ways to truly improve them.
In almost any realm it is easy to design things that are "cool looking but useless". This is all the more troublesome when one manages to deceive oneself into thinking that it is not useless and to deceive others into investing or working on it.
Something to keep in mind while you're kicking around those ideas for new startups in the back of your head.
I agree with most of your statements. However, the designer stated that it was a concept design, not meant to be implemented in real life. I could see this used in a futuristic movie, for example. To discourage someone from creating art that gives them pleasure though nonfunctional is wrong to me.
Shouldn't a concept design acknowledge physical law with at least a tiny nod towards actual application? Otherwise it's art for art's sake, not design.
The standard upright bicycle has looked almost exactly the same for over a century, for very good reason. The basic diamond-frame design is very close to perfect. A derailed-chain drivetrain can exceed 98% efficiency, is cheap to build and is trivially easy to repair and maintain. I love folders, I love recumbents, I love full-sus mountain bikes, but for 99% of riders and 99% of journeys, precious little has changed since the baby boom.
There have been four meaningful breakthroughs in bicycle design in the last fifty or so years. Shimano's indexed derailer gears, Rohloff's SpeedHub, Mike Burrows' Compact Geometry and Andrew Ritchie's Brompton Bicycle. All of them were painstaking developments that took years of work. Burrows' Compact Geometry is a change as trivial as sloping the top tube on a standard frame, but it took years to get right.
I see dozens of these bicycle design concepts every year and every single one I have seen has been absolutely terrible. In the case of this design, the wheels would be so lacking in lateral stiffness as to make the bicycle frightening to ride and the epicyclic rear wheel would be lucky to go ten miles before self-destructing on road debris. Won't work, never will work, never should have been committed to paper.
The designer had seemingly no interest in the century of development behind the modern bicycle and no inclination to investigate why the status quo is as it is. He bumbled in and designed something cool-looking but useless, because he obviously has no interest in such trivia as the laws of physics. Personally, I think that these bicycle concepts embody the antithesis of good design - a useless, style-led attitude that rarely leads to anything but last year's model wearing this year's tailfins.
If you want to design table lamps and dribbly teapots, keep churning out this hogwash. If you want to change the world, start designing with your brain, not your felt tip pens. The world is full of vital, urgent, life-or-death design problems, but they need substance, not style.