I recently ran across the molded plywood JANO “dual bike” concept while I was doing a Google search for something else. I immediately forgot what I had been searching for in the first place as I starting reading about this concept bike that Roland Kaufmann designed, with Christoph Pauschitz as his supporting tutor, for his industrial design thesis project at the University of Applied Sciences, Joanneum in Graz, Austria. Roland explains that the dual bike concept is targeted at users who “demand a bicycle that can be used occasionally for fitness and that also fulfills the needs of every day life.”
The concept itself is nice, but what really interested me was his documentation of the design process. The webpage shows several of the sketches and research images from the development of the bike. To see more, I encourage you to download Roland’s 138-page thesis pdf file, which documents his entire design process. The pdf file is mostly written in German, but it is still a worthwhile download for those of us who can’t read the language. A very small percentage of the passages are in English, but for the most part the charts, photographs, sketches, and renderings do a good job of telling the story without the text.
I was happily surprised when I got toward the end of the document to see that Roland listed my Bicycle Design blog in his reference links. Very cool. If you are reading this Roland, nice job on the project.
Update 6-13: The Core 77 blog linked to this post late last week (Thanks Core). From that post, it appears that Treehugger and Gizmodo picked up the Jano story this week.
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