Category: Concept
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Design Week in Milan 2013
In the last month or so, I have been traveling quite a bit for work, so there hasn’t been very much activity here at the Bicycle Design blog. Last week, I was in Milan, Italy for Euroluce and Salone del Mobile, which I have mentioned before are my favorite design focused shows. In addition to…
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Viks and Elektrokatze- steel is still real
I have been traveling in China since last Monday, so the blog has been neglected a bit. During that time though, I have been receiving quite a few design submissions from readers, so I want to quickly take the opportunity to share a couple of them with you. Indrek Narusk is the designer behind Velonia…
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City Speeder recumbent by Roel Verhagen-Kaptein
Fresh on the heels of my last post, we have a reader submitted design from Roel Verhagen-Kaptein (perfect for a day like today when I am pressed for time). Roel explains that the City Speeder is “a recumbent bike made for commuting in a fast and comfortable way. The streamlined body makes the bike fast and…
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An e-bike for Deutsche Post by Luke Guttery
Luke Guttery, of Axon56 design lab, recently sent me these images from a project that he has been working on for Deutsche Post. The electric bike, designed specifically for use by the postal service in Germany, is a collaborative design effort with Grace GmbH and Nicolai GmbH (a company that Luke believes is the highest…
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Wooden bike by Yojiro Oshima
Yojiro Oshima is a student in the Craft & Industrial Design Department at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. For his final project before graduation, he designed and made a wooden bike (complete with wooden wheels, handlebars, and saddle). His goal with the design was to incorporate the benefits of a beam frame and a standard…
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An electric bike design competition from eBikeTec
“Are Electric Bicycles the Future of Cycling?” Bicycling magazine asked that question recently on Twitter in reference to an article on the growth of e-bikes as a category. The article by David Howard quotes Pat Hus of Interbike, who estimates that “there are now 150 million e-bikes in use worldwide, mostly in China. By 2025,…
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Backbrat bike grill by Mathias Hintermann
“The joy of cycling, now with brat and beer.” That is the tagline at the bottom of Mathias Hintermann’s webpage for his Backbrat design, a portable grill that attached to a rack on the back of your bike. Mathias explains the idea behind his design. “In Germany we love cycling, and we love to grill…
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The Dream Machine by Jonny Mole
The Dream Machine, a futuristic racing bike by Italian design studio Jonny Mole Design, recently was selected as a winning entry for the Bicycles category in the Taipei Cycle D&I awards 2013, an event organized by iF DESIGN to reward the best projects in the bike industry. The award will be presented on March 23rd…
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Vote for the winner of the ISUDA bike share design competition
The ISUDA Bike Share Design Competition ended about a month ago, and I am long overdue in posting the entries to be judged and discussed by all of you who read this blog. We didn’t get as much participation as we hoped for (far fewer than the previous design competition held at Bicycle Design), but…
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Bicycle Lock Dock and other locking concepts
According to industrial designer Douglas Schaller, “the bicycle theft industry is at least $393 million annually in the United States and the crime costs Americans between $800 and $1 billion.” That problem was the reason for the Bicycle Lock Dock, a 2009 team student design project led by Schaller along with Cassie Tweed, Seung Kim, Mike…
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A collection of concept bikes
At first glance, the Clarity bike by designaffairs studio looks like a typical fixie or singlespeed road bike. Closer inspection though reveals a transparent frame that appears to be made of glass. Actually, the material is an advanced polymer that, according to the designers, “combines high impact resistance, lightweight properties and a gentle flexibility that…
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Bike sketches- fast and slow
The deadline to submit entries for the ISUDA Bike Share Design Competition passed while I was traveling home from Asia over the weekend. We didn’t receive as many entries as the last design competition staged here at Bicycle Design, but it is still going to take a while to discuss them with the jury and…
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Organic Transit ELF
Not all that far from where I live, a small group of people are building innovative solar/pedal powered velomobile trikes in a former furniture warehouse in downtown Durham, North Carolina. I have been meaning to discuss the Organic Transit ELF for a while now, but it is one of the many posts that I just…
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2012- The year in review at BicycleDesign.net
Another year has come to a close, and that means that it’s time for the annual recap post for this blog. Compared to 2011, traffic was up slightly with 1,236,847 page views in 2012. About 30% of the visitors in the past year came from the United States (where this blog is based). The United…
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A collection of concept bikes
I posted about Antoine Fritsch’s B2O bamboo frame bike in 2009. Since that time, he has continued his work using laminated bamboo with an electric scooter and the bamboo cargo trike that you see above. Italian designer Luca Feletti recently graduated from the University of Ferrara. For his thesis project, Luca designed an electric modular…
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A partial catch-up post
I have been especially busy with work since my recent trip, so I haven’t been able to keep up with the blog. I have seen some interesting things to share lately though, so I will quickly pass along a few of them today. I don’t know what it is about bike lights and Kickstarter, but…
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Two bike designers ahead of their times
I first saw the news on Bike Biz that engineer and inventor Dr. Alex Moulton passed away this week at the age of 92. For any of you who aren’t familiar with his work, Dr. Moulton pioneered the small wheel bicycle in the early 1960s with the launch of his first full suspension bicycles. He…