Category: Concept
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Catching up with links
If you have seen the carbon/titanium Exogrid frames from Holland Cycles, you already know that they are works of art. Filmaker and photographer Jeff Katz recently documented the Holland Cycles framebuilding process starting with selection of the tubes and ending with a ride on the complete bike. The laser cutting of the titanium outer tube…
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Bontrager computer/stem integration concept
Another concept design fresh from Trek World 2012 is this Bontrager stem concept by Ryan Hahn, an industrial designer in Trek’s road group. The concept, which has a removable computer integrated into the magnesium stem, has been dubbed “Computermatron Stemigration” by Ryan. Let’s just hope that name sticks if this stem moves forward into production.…
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Learning bike concepts from TrekWorld 2012
Every August, TrekWorld provides an opportunity for dealers to travel to Wisconsin and check out new bikes from the company. The show is also is an opportunity to for the industrial designers at Trek to show those same dealers a bunch of cool concept bikes (like this one from last year). TrekWorld 2012 wrapped up…
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Project Aura wheel lighting system
According to the Core 77 blog, “Project Aura is a bicycle lighting system designed to address the issue of nighttime urban bike commuting.” The design, by Ethan Frier and Jonathan Ota of Carnegie Mellon University, was recently chosen as the student winner in the Transportation category of this year’s Core77 Design Awards. You can read…
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A few bike links from Google +
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a slight decline in activity lately. I am definitely not giving up on Twitter, but I have been playing around with Google Plus for the last couple of weeks (add me to your circles if you are using it too). So far, I have discovered…
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Yann Lewandowski’s Cinelli Laser 2012 Concept
If you have been cycling for a long time, you no doubt remember the beautifully sculpted Cinelli Laser from the 80s (or better yet, this version). Those bikes were, and still are, highly coveted (by me at least). There has been some talk about a limited edition reissue of the Laser for about a year…
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Toyota Prius Project concept bike
This is turning out to be a REALLY busy work week for me (better than the alternative, so I am not complaining). I don’t have much free time to post on the blog, but I do want to quickly mention the Toyota Prius project concept bike, a design project to “build a bike that encapsulates…
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Bikes, hubs, jeans, a camera bag, and more
The new Specialized Source is a bike that caught my attention as I was looking at the 2012 Global Product Launch coverage at Bike Hugger. The sporty urban bike comes as either a derailleur version or with a belt drive. I like the fact that it includes fenders, a bell, and a dyno-powered light…feature that…
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RPEV hybrid electric bike and more
Roy Prince designs and builds electric bikes (and other electric vehicles) in Oxnard, California. He chronicles the builds on his website, RPEV.org, where you can find pictures and blog entries for the various bikes. His latest project is the eCortina v2 e-bike, which you can read more about here. Roy points out that his “hybrid…
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Rael road bike concept 2.0
You may remember the Rael road bike concept by Evan Solida from a post earlier this year. Since that time, Evan has refined the design and set up a website for the project, which he hopes to move forward with soon. Evan’s primary focus lately has been the development of his Cerevelum “digital bike mirror”,…
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SoBi- a smartphone based bike sharing system
Around this time last year, I posted the Etta bike, a semi-recumbent city bike that Nick Foley designed as his senior thesis project at Pratt. Since then, Nick graduated and started working with the design team at the bike-sharing company Social Bicycles. Nick explains that Social Bicycles (SoBi) is a bike-sharing system that uses “smart” bikes…
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City Electric Bicycle by Vojtěch Sojka
Industrial Design student Vojtěch Sojka recently designed this ‘city electric bicycle’ as his thesis project at the University of Technology in Brno (Czech Republic). The school project was developed as a concept for the Czech bike company Superior, who helped Sojka with the production of the prototype. Sojka’s goal with the design was to create…
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Two very similar plywood bike concepts
Five or six years ago while looking through a book of classic bent plywood chair designs, I sketched out a bike frame inspired by the work of Charles and Ray Eames, Alvar Aalto, and others. I had seen many plywood bike frames in the past, but none of them took advantage of the flexibility that…
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African Bicycle Design Contest Winner- TU Delft
The team from the Delft University of Technology won the African Bicycle Design Contest last Friday with a simple trailer design which features a modular box system to keep the cargo secure and separated. The idea for the modular containers was based on the team’s research into the transportation needs of local farmers and fishermen…
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Ten bikes in the space of one car
Cyclehoop Ltd is a UK based firm of designers and architects who specialize in producing innovative indoor and outdoor cycle parking solutions. They are best known for their retrofit circular racks, which convert existing sign and lamp posts into usable bike parking. The brightly colored car-shaped racks that they created for the London Festival of Architecture…
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Final awards ceremony for the African Bicycle Design Contest
I mentioned last year that I am serving as one of the judges in the African Bicycle Design Contest, the aim of which is to create “affordable quality bicycles tuned to the needs of (potential) cyclists in Africa.” In the first ‘open wiki-bike’ phase of the contest, which took place in 2010, we ranked the…
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Blaze- a handlebar mounted virtual bike lane
I have been a bit preoccupied with a local bike lane issue for the past few days, so this virtual bicycle lane article from Bike Biz caught my attention this morning. The Blaze concept, by British design student Emily Brooke of the University of Brighton, is a handlebar-mounted laser that projects a personal bike lane…
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Dave and Rob’s custom trike
After seeing the post yesterday about the DuoCycle, Dave Thompson sent me this picture of a similar trike that he designed and built for himself and his son. Dave’s son Rob was in a car accident three years ago and suffered a severe head injury that left him in a wheelchair. The trike Dave built…