Nope, we have gotten somewhere by trying something new after studying what has been done before, that's the step this designer skipped (besides knowing anything about materials).

When a designer has neither technical expertise nor any real knowledge of the problem at hand, he's just a kid drawing an airplane with better crayons — "OMG guys it's going to have lazer beams coming out the front, and 19 engines so it goes really fast, and it's going to carry its own portable runway that it can land on anywhere, and it's going to have spikes all over it to stop enemies, and it's invisible and its radars can see through time and it's going to cost 25 cents to produce and get 10,000 MPG running on flat diet coke." If this bicycle "design" qualifies as useful because it happens to throw a few wild ideas out, I'm inviting a 6 year old to all my future design meetings.

As for this bike considered in context of this whole multimodal whateverthedeuce plan for a national park, it's just a new version of the old myth that the only reason people aren't doing something is that the objects you need to do it aren't cool looking enough. It's fun to think that one man with a CAD program and a mouse can change the world just by taking an existing made object and smoothing out the lines, but it just doesn't work that way.

The core idea proposed by these documents is that the main reason people aren't spending their holidays riding touring MTBs towing trailers instead of driving about is inadequate swoopyness in the design of the equipment. Secondary causes include the lack of an integrated trash receptacle and the insistence on tensioned spoke wheels. Conventional wheels are particularly offensive to the untalented designer not simply because the design is over a century old and has seen virtually no improvement through added swoopyness (and not for lack of people trying, either), but it is really, really difficult and boring to render in a CAD program.

The Myth of Inadequate Swoopyness is a tolerable annoyance in cycling design when applied only to helmets — it's actually kind of charming to watch young optimists think that they have the magic design that packs enough swoopyness (or occasionally dandyness) to make people who don't wear helmets suddenly wear them. And the EPS molds are cheap enough and the product disposable enough that it doesn't really matter that a helmet can't be made to not touch the hair or not be larger than the human head or weigh less than about 250g or not have a chin strap any more than riding an off road touring rig can be made an unchallenging pursuit. But once in a while the myth gets out of hand, and you end up with a situation where a noble project like Trek's 161 initiative (a design and marketing campaign aimed at the 161 million Americans who don't bike) gets bogged down in swoopy designs and accessories. The result was the Lime, a CAD vomit design complete with a futuristic chain case and integrated personal electronics storage that became a colossal business failure and industry laughing stock.

For the record, I'm really not all that critical of this blog for posting this stuff — if this is what young people are paying universities for the privilege of sitting around and mocking up all day, then I supposed that's what bicycle design amounts to right now, and if there's going to be a blog called Bicycle Design then that's part of what's going to be posted there. My gripe is with the designers who don't take their task seriously enough to do a little homework, and the teachers who let their students get away with work that displays no skill beyond CAD manipulation.

Corran, sometimes I share my opinion in a post and sometimes I simply pass along links or concepts so that readers can form their own opinions. It is really just a factor of the free time I have available in most cases. The blog is something I do for fun, so when work or family issues are pressing, my posts tend to be quickly written with little or no extra commentary. Other times, I do have the time to share my opinions and attempt to discuss the topic at hand in a little more “in depth”. Honestly, I wish I could put a lot of time into each and every post, but it is just not always possible.

I agree that I could have corrected some of the grammar in Alessio’s text. English is obviously a second language for him, so a bit of minor editing for clarity’s sake might have been a good idea. At the time though, I was in a hurry and posted the text exactly as he wrote it. Confusing perhaps, but I don’t think lack of editing makes the blog any less credible. Bicycle Design may not be as polished as a big corporate site, but everything that I post, whether it contains commentary from me or not, is pretty much unfiltered. You may not always like the content, but I do think it is always presented in an honest fashion (in this case without praise or criticism from me).

I will point out again that anyone can comment on any post, even if he or she chooses to remain anonymous as the previous commenter did. I may disagree, but I don’t EVER delete comments unless they are blatant spam or extremely offensive. I really do believe that differing opinions and real interactions with readers make the blog more interesting, for me and for everyone else. I will continue to share my personal opinions in posts when I have the time. Whether I do or don’t, you are welcome to leave your opinions here…even if you believe that I am “spewing propaganda crap”. I’ll have to disagree with you on that though.

Its kinda like he just chose a bunch of buzzwords and then made a bike out of them. I'm surprised we didn't hear something about cold fusion.

Again, this is economically infeasible to deploy. Carbon fiber? Carbon fiber is ridiculously expensive, and is also hard on the environment with them using a variety of glues to keep the fibers together.

And batteries aren't sustainable. People seem to think that they are. They aren't. Have you ever tried to dispose of a battery the "right way"?

I think what Anonymous is trying to say is, even if this blog IS about throwing out ideas and concepts, I would have flunked him for his thesis because it fails at every step of the way.

Oh, and I'm hoping you used some Italian auto-translator because the English grammar is making me puke. And if you did, you should've read over it to make sure it makes sense. All it needed was a few words removed here and there.

Credibility is what I'm really getting at. How can a Bicycle Design blog praise such a horrible design? If you want to be credible, and instead of just spewing propaganda crap, give us your own opinion.

A simple line at the end like, "While we applaud his intentions, clearly the bike design is economically impossible, environmentally infeasible and — for bicycling — it's unusable."

I will reiterate that criticism is always welcome on this blog, even from people such as you who wish to remain anonymous. Design critiques are an important part of the learning process, and any student who wants to make it as an industrial designer needs to develop a pretty thick skin. That said, criticism is best if it is specific and constructive. General statements “like this is garbage” (or on the flipside, “this is great") don’t really add much to the conversation.

Come off it, you know this design is totally unrealistic and not even worth critiquing. Every feature of these documents indicates that the designer had no intention of them ever becoming reality or even being submitted to those who might seek to improve them — they're clearly made to impress people who know nothing about cycling, not to put forward ideas in the world of actual bike design.

I mean, for christ's sake, you're really telling me that hard shell panniers with nowhere for external lashing of gear shouldn't be laughed out of the room? That a trailer will ever function bobbing around on the end of a flexible pole? That a bike needs a frame-integrated trash bin? That having the pannier load that high would ever be stable on dirt trails? That that wheel design isn't garbage? That an offroad bike could have an unsuspended rear end cantilevered out that far and not have to be murderously heavy? Save for the smooth CAD and photoshop work, what can you point to about this design that doesn't give the same impression as a five year old's drawing of an airplane?

For bicycles to be taken seriously as part of "inter-modal transportation" or whatever this jibberish is about, the people who design and think about them need to take their task seriously. You and I both know that this is unserious garbage. I may be harsh but the designer is wantonly ignorant of his subject and cynical about his task — who is the real source of negativity?