
What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016) - dlazar
http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html
======
jdietrich
Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills
of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is
being able to _see_ what's actually there.

A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about
five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively
homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually _seen_ a bicycle.
They've looked, but they haven't understood its form, they haven't decomposed
it into lines and shapes. They know that it has two wheels, a chain, a saddle
and some handlebars, but they've never actually noticed the shapes that join
them together.

[https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-
Definitive/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-
Definitive/dp/1585429201/)

~~~
21
> A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form

I disagree, compared with most objects a human daily interacts with - doors,
furniture, lifts, cars - a bicycle is one of the most complex visible forms.
I'm talking about what can be seen from outside, since obviously a car is much
more complex on the inside.

Most of the stuff we deal with is composed of square/boxes and circle/tubes.
Triangular shapes are quite rare in human spaces (I don't have any in my
house), and the bicycle critically has two triangles at it's core. Chains are
also very rare. So I don't think it's a surprise that many struggle with the
core - two triangles and a chain.

~~~
jdietrich
Clench your fist. Take a moment to notice the complexity of the geometry.
Consider how you might reduce that shape to simple geometric forms. Consider
how you might represent the three-dimensional form as a set of two-dimensional
lines. Turn your hand around and look at it from a different angle. Open your
fist and make an "OK" or a "peace" sign.

Go to your refrigerator and take out a lettuce leaf or a piece of broccoli.
Look out of your window at a tree or a bush. Go to your bathroom and look at
the toilet or the faucet. Look in the mirror and make a funny face.

A bicycle is more complicated than many rectilinear man-made objects, but it's
a relatively straightforward collection of lines. Even the drawings in the
linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately
recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively
speaking.

~~~
blt
You conflate geometry and topology * . The topology of the human hand is right
in front of you to examine. A lettuce leaf is like a disk plus a wavy boundary
and noise. Broccoli is a tree. A bicycle is topologically complex object with
high genus. A bad drawing of a hand can still has the right connectivity, it
could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand. Not true for most of these
bicycle drawings.

* using "topology" to refer to the graph structure of the skeleton of the solid, not the typical mathematical meaning.

~~~
Doxin
> it could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand.

It's probably a good thing that this isn't what defines a drawing as good. A
bicycle frame has a couple straight lines and that's about it. A hand, or
broccoli, has complex compound curves all over the place.

Ask any artist to draw a bicycle and it'll probably end up pretty good. Ask
any artist to draw a hand and there's a good chance it'll not end up good,
even when using reference material.

There's a reason a lot of artists have problems drawing hands.

~~~
gowld
Hands aren't hard to draw because hands are super complicated; hands are hard
to draw because humans are evolutionarily finely tuned to recognize and be
disgusted by distorted human bodies, which in nature is a signal of disease.
Look at the diversity of broccoli proportion at the grocery, then imagine
hands with the same diversity -- grotesquely long or lumpy or twisted, which
too few or too many fingers. OTOH, cartoon hands, outside the uncanny valley,
look fine, even when (as is common) missing a finger.

------
duderific
If you scroll down, the designer has produced images that match some of the
ideas from the sketches. They are beautiful and mesmerizing.

At first I thought he had actually built out the physical bicycles from the
sketches, but it turns out they are just computer renderings. Nonetheless it
shows the power of "mistake" driven design, to generate novel ideas.

~~~
atourgates
As odd at is - this[1] design has a couple elements that have been reproduced
in the real world.

While the exact 2wd system shown in the rendering would have some real issues,
2wd mountain bike systems do exist. They can rely on impressively strange
chain routing[2], a system of gears and internal shafts[3], or just an
electric hub[4] (which is admittedly, not really the same thing).

As far as the one-sided frame goes, Canondale makes a one-sided fork called
the Lefty[5], that's in mass production and reasonably popular. One-sided rear
triangles only seem to exist on motorcycles, and there's an interesting
discussion here[6] on why that's the case, with an example of a one-off
"righty" bicycle.

[1] [http://www.gianlucagimini.it/wp-
content/uploads/2016/03/Gian...](http://www.gianlucagimini.it/wp-
content/uploads/2016/03/Gianluca_Gimini-Velocipedia-7.jpg)

[2] [https://www.singletracks.com/blog/mtb-gear/all-wheel-
drive-m...](https://www.singletracks.com/blog/mtb-gear/all-wheel-drive-
mountain-bike-test-ride/)

[3] [http://christinibicycles.com/](http://christinibicycles.com/)

[4] [https://newatlas.com/easy-motion-evo-awd-big-bud-
ebike/54434...](https://newatlas.com/easy-motion-evo-awd-big-bud-ebike/54434/)

[5]
[https://www.cannondale.com/en/International/Innovation/lefty...](https://www.cannondale.com/en/International/Innovation/lefty.aspx)

[6] [http://forums.mtbr.com/general-discussion/why-dont-we-
have-l...](http://forums.mtbr.com/general-discussion/why-dont-we-have-lefty-
rear-triangles-yet-1025959.html)

~~~
dirtyaura
I didn’t know about 2WD bikes existed! I’d love to try out to experience how
it feels to drive 2WD.

The Lefty design also looks very interesting, do you have practical experience
with it?

What an amazing comment full of new eye-opening information for me, thanks

~~~
atourgates
I've ridden a lefty a couple times, and apart from the visuals, it didn't
really feel unusual. I more or less didn't notice that I was on a lefty.

Here's an article that looks at it a bit more in depth:
[https://factoryjackson.com/2016/02/18/cannondale-lefty-
the-s...](https://factoryjackson.com/2016/02/18/cannondale-lefty-the-story-of-
half-a-fork/)

I haven't tried a 2WD, but everything I've read suggests that the added weight
and friction delivers pretty limited utility, at least in non-electric
versions.

------
lev99
There seems to be two things tested in this exercise. Technical drawing
capabilities and knowledge of bicycle mechanics.

I assume most people that drew bicycles have ridden one, but there are a few
basic common mistakes. The location of the pedals (closer to rear wheel, very
near to floor), the way the chain operate, and the triangle frame are some
examples. I did not notice anyone drawing details around the gear mechanisms
nor the breaks. Many people demonstrated acceptable drawing technique while
getting mechanical details of the bicycle incorrect.

I think this exercise highlights a great amount of ignorance around bicycles.
I purpose society would benefit from better bicycle education. Better bicycle
education might encourage bicycle adoption (needs testing to verify), and
bicycle ridership improves climate change, obesity, traffic, and heart
disease. In addition to increased adoption, bicycle education would improve
bicycle safety.

Bicycle education as a semester long optional course in high school is a great
reach goal. It could mirror driver education where teenagers learn traffic
rules and laws, and also basic bicycle maintenance. Perhaps with enough active
bicycle riding time it could count as a Physical Education credit.

A good first step would be more high quality videos and pamphlets on the topic
of bicycle education.

~~~
jschwartzi
Ask people to draw the powertrain or running gear of a car and you'd get much
the same result.

~~~
Buldak
Is that a good comparison? How often does the average person actually see
either of those things? The reason it's surprising that people struggle to
draw bikes from memory is that most of us see them all the time.

~~~
21
The brain doesn't work like a photo camera. It remembers strictly the minimum
required to do it's job, in a highly abstract and compressed form.

How a bike fits together it's kind of irrelevant for most people, even if you
ride one or if you must dodge one.

~~~
macintux
Which is effectively the point of the article.

------
pornel
Reminds of of Character Amnesia[1] phenomenon, where people can forget how to
write Chinese/Japanese characters, even though they know how to read them.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia)

~~~
dvh
I know how to read Mississippi

~~~
majewsky
I know how to read miscellaneous. (Thanks autocomplete.)

------
userbinator
It would be interesting to split the respondents into two groups, one who
rides bikes regularly and one who doesn't, and compare the results.

The "2WD" ones are particularly perplexing.

On the other hand, I bet if you asked people to draw a car, 99% of them would
draw something realistic --- it's the arrangement of the frame tubes on a bike
that most people just haven't looked at in detail or remembered.

~~~
huphtur
Pro cyclists asked to draw a bike in 15 seconds:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXwbgio5cU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXwbgio5cU)

~~~
gnicholas
Wonder how their mechanics would have done.

I think the only reason I could draw a bike with any accuracy is because my
dad taught me how to fix it. Otherwise it would be a complete black box.

------
skybrian
I don't know if he redid this independently or failed to give credit, but here
is an article [1] describing some similar experiments done by Rebecca Lawson.
And a formal academic paper from 2006 [2].

[1]
[https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~rlawson/cycleweb.html](https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~rlawson/cycleweb.html)

[2]
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03195929](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03195929)

------
ianbicking
I'm looking at the third one down and wondering: why aren't all-wheel-drive
bikes a thing? (Well, steering...)

I guess there is such a thing:
[http://christinibicycles.com/](http://christinibicycles.com/) – sounds pretty
complicated: 'A handlebar-mounted switch controls the AWD “shift on the fly”
clutch. When the clutch is engaged, the rear spiral gear interlocks with the
rear hub and power is transferred via internal shafts to the forward spiral
gear set, which drives the CHRISTINI freehub. Due to a slight gearing
differential, the front wheel is not actively powered on smooth level ground.
However, the moment the rear wheel slips, power is instantaneously transferred
to the front wheel. Similarly, the moment that the front wheel decelerates, as
in hitting a rock or starting to wash out in a corner, power and traction are
transferred to the front wheel.'

Makes me wonder if you could make an electric-assist bike where the assist was
on the front wheel, thus saving all the complicated mechanical power transfer.
I also suspect driving the front wheel feels crazy on a bike and I just don't
realize it.

~~~
douchescript
My electrib bike is AWD. Electric in the front and mechanical in the back.
Very good for recovery on a patch of ice, impossible with just back wheel
drive.

~~~
ianbicking
What does it feel like when you aren't peddling and it's just front-wheel
drive?

~~~
douchescript
It doesn’t drive if no peddling, legal stuff here in sweden.

------
jonshariat
I think this is a great example that shows how our brains remember/recognize
things. (Which may be help in machine learning)

This is how people have remembered a bike.

2 wheels, spaced apart Metal connecting Pedal in the middle Seat on top
Handlebars connected to the front wheel.

The details of how it's connected, where, spacing, etc. Isn't really noted by
our brains unless they see/use them often.

I wonder if this exercise could help use fine tune ML patterns.

~~~
edgarvaldes
I think it's funny how many comments give great importance to the object being
a bicycle or the person being a bike rider to explain the output.

~~~
jonshariat
Agreed. It can really be anything. People don't look at things, they scan and
store/recognize optimized patterns.

------
okmokmz
I wonder why such a high percentage of females attached the chain the the
front wheel in their drawings

edit: a better way to phrase it would probably be: Of the drawings where the
chain was attached to the front wheel, I wonder why such a large majority were
done by females

~~~
hermitdev
I was surprised at the number of drawings that connected the front & rear
wheels directly. I'm sure those would be fun to ride...

Also the number of bikes that were just structurally unsound, such as just the
seat-stay attached to the rear wheel. Quite likely first bump you hit, things
would not end well (if it even took that long). I'm not a mechanical engineer,
but I did take a single class on statics in college, and that's enough for me
to see that things would not end well (at least with current materials I'm
aware of).

~~~
okmokmz
Agreed, some of the frames were surprising and quite funny. I've never ridden
a bike professionally, or even as a serious hobby, but I would've guessed that
way more people would at least get the general frame shape of a rhombus with 2
connected corners and the fork coming down from the front edge.

------
pasta
In Firefox I had to go to readability mode for it to see, but the idea and
execution is great!

Reminds me of the company that creates dolls how you design them:
[https://www.childsown.com/](https://www.childsown.com/)

------
logfromblammo
I thought it was interesting how many of the wrong designs were similar to the
lead image, with one central triangle and all other elements sprouting from
it. It's tantalizingly close to the "standard" design, yet still incorrect.

I wonder how many of those people would _insist_ that their sketch is correct,
even when confronted with the evidence of an actual bicycle for comparison...

------
chatmasta
This is like what happens when you ask the client what they want the website
to look like.

------
C4stor
If I sum up : a guy "pesters" (good way to make sure people do a bad job !) a
lot of people to draw a bike, selects the 50 most flawed drawings, and HN
commenters conclude "people are bad at drawing bikes"?

The experimental process is flawed on so many levels I'm amazed anyone is
jumping to a conclusion besides "That's some funny looking bikes here!".
Something the author reckons by refraining to conclude anything himself.

------
bunderbunder
I like this. Even if they wouldn't work, some of the designs are really
beautiful when translated into 3D models.

It also sort of reminds me a bit of a minor collection I've been making of
children's book illustrations of kites, which started out of a morbid
fascination with how, despite how very simple an object a basic diamond kite
is, very few of them get all the details right.

------
bena
I had to go look up pictures of actual bikes to confirm what (I think) is
wrong with the lead picture.

I also wonder how I would have done in the blind.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
For any still not seeing it: The chain stay from the bottom bracket is
missing. The rear wheel should be held by a triangular arrangement of the
frame, but the side of the triangle that runs parallel to the ground isn’t
there

~~~
bena
I didn't want to mention what I thought was wrong because I didn't want to
accidentally influence anybody else, especially if I wound up wrong.

But yeah, after giving it a good, long look, along with his mention that it
would break when someone sat on it, I guessed that there should have been a
bar between the back wheel and where the pedals are.

~~~
skykooler
I'm not sure it _would_ break when you sat on it; the chain would be in
tension, holding those two sections together and filling the task of that bar.
The problem would be when you started to pedal, and that bar is not there to
stop the chain from pulling the rear wheel towards the pedals.

------
keypress
That's odd I noticed this on some vector art just two minutes before seeing
this story.

[https://www.cyclotricity.com/uk/custom/mix-match-your-own-
co...](https://www.cyclotricity.com/uk/custom/mix-match-your-own-conversion-
kit.html)

~~~
keypress
Not to mention the magic drive train.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Some diversities are gender driven. Nearly 90% of drawings in which the
chain is attached to the front wheel (or both to the front and the rear) were
made by females.

It would be more interesting to know what percentage of drawings had the chain
attached incorrectly, first- then how many of them were by female
participants. If it was just a couple of drawings, there's not much "gender
driven diversity" to speak of. Equally for the overcomplicated frames drawn by
males, of course.

(Edit: I'm sorry to pick on such an irrelevant detail of this beautiful
posting, but at this point anything that seems to allude to stereotypes about
females not being comfortable with the function of complex mechanisms, grates;
especially if it's using numbers to make a point).

~~~
Dylan16807
I'm curious about more numbers, too, but even if it's 1 vs. 7 I think it's
worth noting.

------
akhleung
Heh, when I was a kid I used to draw a lot, and I remember being bothered that
I didn't know how to draw a bike, so back then I explicitly memorized the
shapes (parallelogram in the back, and another line for the front wheels).
Wonder if that's common for doodlers.

~~~
notatoad
A parallelogram is missing the seat tube, which is a fairly important part of
the bike.

------
jvagner
To extend this a bit...

If you like watching any of the popular Gym Fail video channels on Youtube --
many people also have poor, or counter- intuitive notions of things like
purpose built machines and the physical body mechanics/physics that marry up
to them.

Recall is hard, but so is.. deciphering.

------
toomanybeersies
I'd be interested to see this broken down by country. Do Dutch or Danish
people draw more correct bicycles than Americans?

Another interesting thing would be to see if there's any reason why people
draw bikes facing left or right. I feel like for me it's natural to draw
vehicles facing right, so they'd drive in the direction that you read in. It
seems that most of the drawings here are in the opposite direction. The cycle
lane signs in New Zealand also face to the left [1].

[1] [https://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/traffic-control-
devices-m...](https://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/traffic-control-devices-
manual/sign-specifications/view/54)

------
kevin_thibedeau
Some remind me of Pedersen's [1] which look ungainly and structurally unsound
too.

[1] [http://www.pedersenbicycles.com/](http://www.pedersenbicycles.com/)

------
mzzter
When I applied to art school, I had to draw a bicycle as part of the admission
evaluation. My peers would post their admission submissions online whether or
not they were eventually admitted. If you search “RISD bicycle drawings”,
you’ll see tons of bicycle drawings. They range from insanely photorealistic
to simply abstract.

Obviously, we all used reference material to make sure our depiction was
accurate. But it is nonetheless interesting to see what people come up with
when trying to impress an art school admissions team.

------
ada1981
What happens when you ask people to make a mobile friendly website?

~~~
superkuh
Most web design has been corrupted by mobile-friendly concepts. It's nice to
finally see a site that isn't made crap by giant buttons, whitespace, and thin
vertical scroll.

~~~
ada1981
The site just didn’t work on Safari Mobile without a huge bloated menu.

------
baddox
> Little I knew this is actually a test that psychologists use to demonstrate
> how our brain sometimes tricks us into thinking we know something even
> though we don’t.

This seems like a leap, or at least an oversimplification of what the author
is referring to in psychology. I’m convinced that my attempt to draw a bicycle
would be quite terrible, but I’m also convinced that I would be able to look
at my drawing and judge it as terrible.

~~~
comboy
Most people don't do this check though.

------
theshadowknows
So what’s wrong with the bike?

~~~
staz
missing a metal bar behind the chain

------
wuliwong
This made me smile. I'm actually somewhat skilled as an artist (just compared
to the average person) but I can assure you I have never drawn a respectable
image of a bicycle. I really liked taking these sketches and making them more
realistic. Maybe there is some genius hidden in these seemingly inaccurate
sketches?

------
balabaster
These are somewhat amusing, but I'd have to say that if you asked a bike tech
or anyone that spent any amount of time being their own bike mechanic, even
with a very limited amount of artistic talent, there's virtually nothing to
drawing a bike that would function adequately in the real world.

------
ThJ
I won't get the answer to that question, it seems, because their site doesn't
work properly on mobile...

------
gameswithgo
I have done a lot of biking and saw this article a while back. It makes me
look closely at every depiction of a bike I see. We have some pillows with
bikes on them. I look close and notice the chainring is MONSTER huge, like a
60T. Whoever rides the bike on those pillows is not to be messed with.

------
anonytrary
I find it strange that no one drew the bike projected on a plane other than
the plane containing the wheels. No one drew the bike head-on or at an angle.

~~~
jshevek
I speculate that the author created an expectation of a "quick, simple,
sketch". Even an artist might prefer that plane, if they are expected to draw
quickly.

------
Kagerjay
reminds me of this meme that gets featured on reddit r/programmerhumor fairly
often

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5fyv4r/kir...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5fyv4r/kirby_dev_team_attemps_to_draw_him_by_hand_xpost/)

------
caf
S02E06 of Brain Games asks a university class to do this - then they build
each of the drawn bikes and attempt to ride them.

------
framebit
I love this project! We got some prints of these for a family member who's a
rabid cyclist and also one for our house.

------
visarga
All the while we're still looking down on GANs. AI has surpassed average human
level in this domain.

------
brna
I bet it would be hard going trough all of these and drawing a bike
afterwards.

------
lesss365
Funny, this is RISD's infamous application requirement.

------
clojurestan
These people went ahead and made the mistake bikes[0].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXwbgio5cU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXwbgio5cU)

------
colanderman
Similar: draw an ant, top-down view.

Where DO the legs go?

~~~
jshevek
Is this really a common misunderstanding? I thought everybody knew that ants
have three body sections, and the legs attached to the middle. We learned this
in elementary school. Putting legs on the head or the back section would
create so many unnecessary complications.

~~~
colanderman
> Putting legs on the head or the back section would create so many
> unnecessary complications.

I mean, so would attaching a bicycle chain to the front wheel.

After all, why shouldn't an ant have one pair attached to its tail segment? 6
is a lot of legs to cram into the tiny middle segment.

I first partook in this exercise in a small group of STEM graduate students
preparing for a youth teaching program. Maybe 2/3 of us got it wrong (myself
included).

~~~
jshevek
Thank you for this information.

------
ir193
when our programmer implemented exactly what PM required...LOL

------
phendrenad2
I’ve never seen a less mobile-friendly layout. Fixed decorative elements on
the page forcefully covering content.

~~~
monkpit
Agreed - Unreadable on iPhone 6

~~~
adrianhel
Funny. On my Samsung I just saw a non-mobile website and zoomed in.

So I guess...

Samsung > Iphone

~~~
adrianhel
This will get so many downvotes...

