Apple and bikes

Continuing on in the "what if XX made a bike" series, let's take a deep breath and go after the big one: Apple.

Prologue: Today's state of bicycle "captial D" design to my mind is so-so at best. The fact that opportunity still exists for Apple to come in to the market (should they decide they want to) means that design is still lagging, despite all the effort put towards it. At right is a "design" put forth by Puma, a design-conscious fashion clothing manufacturer, for their fourth-generation bike. They appear to be making some kind of statement about color, except they can't quite get even that right (ahem, guys, get a white handlebar, stem, and front rim, and powder-coat the front brake calipers! If you're going to make it about color, DO IT!)

If Apple made a bike, what would it look like? Knowing what I know about Apple (I've been a Mac user since 1984 and have worked for 10 years for Nemetschek North America, makers of Vectorworks, the best-selling CAD product on the Mac), and particularly considering its recent successes with industrial design since the iPod, here is what I could reasonably predict about any Apple product:

• It would be iconic; recognizable as the thing that it is (that is, it would be a realization of a classic design rather than a revolutionary design.)
• It would feature obsessive attention to detail.
• It would focus on the user experience.
• It would definitively fix problems with the product category that users didn't realize they had.
• It would be visually beautiful and a tactile delight.
• It would co-promote other products made by Apple as part of a lifestyle.
  
• It would be expensive, a stretch for the pocketbook; something that conveys status, but stops short of aloofness.
  
• It would be value-engineered, so Apple could make a decent profit.
• It would be sold only through the Apple store. (duh.)
• There would be tremendous opportunity to create a third-party "add-on" ecosystem.
  

So, how would these "branding requirements" translate into a specific bicycle design? What are the "unrealized problems" waiting to be solved in bicycle design that could be fixed with an obsessive amount of user-centric problem solving and delivered through industrial design? I think the major problems to be solved (the "user requirements") are these:

• Looks: The bike should have a minimalist look, as much like a fixie as possible. The explosive popularity of fixies is all about that sexy, iconic bike look.
• Shifting: Bikes need to be easier to use (i.e. shift) so that users don't wear themselves out getting from point A to point B. (Fixies look great, but aren't practical unless you're an athlete.)
• Security: There needs to be a convenient, highly effective anti-theft solution.
  
• Comfort: The places where your body touches the bike, the controls, the seat and the pedals, need improvement. This is after all the "user interface" of the bike. Ideally, other than for a helmet (and maybe some sporty-looking gloves) you wouldn't need any special clothing to use this bike.
  
• Maintenance: The thing needs to set new standards of minimalism in maintenance.

Specking out this bike (at a high level) would be fun—more fun, I daresay, than the sweat-work of designing and testing it. (So, let's do it!) I would think we'd see the following kind of "functional specification" from Apple in trying to fulfill these requirements:

• Frame: Probably hydr0formed aluminum, welded, with smooth-dressed joints. The finish would be anodized ("nanochromatic" colors to match the iPod nano?) and clear-coated. All cables would be internally routed. The frame would be set up so that a minimum number of sizes (maybe just two: small and large) would accommodate all riders. This presumes a maximally adjustable seatpost and stem arrangement.
• Drivetrain: Internally-geared rear hub, probably 8 speed, with an automatic shifter working off cadence and speed scnsors integrated in the frame. Belt drive. Gear range for city hills.
• Brakes: Internal hub brakes front and rear. (Yes, the hubs will be big, but it'll be a clean look and low maintenance. Speaking of which...).
  
• Maintenance: Carbon or aramid drive belt good for 10,000 miles. Sealed bearings everywhere. Aramid-belted tires (possibly tubeless) with interior goo to stop slow leaks. All cables Teflon-coated. An absolute minimum of hardware exposed to the elements. Here's where that famous Apple attention to detail will pay off.
  
• Controls: Brake handles with fully-concealed cabling. The cyclocomputer would be your iPhone or iPod touch running a "free" app from the App Store. The app would integrate GPS, speed, odometer, traffic and weather reports, and (naturally) music. There would be special valve-stem caps that could sense low pressure in your tires and transmit warnings to the control unit via Bluetooth. Oh, and the app would enable customization of your shift points on the transmission. The front hub would be a dyno-hub to keep the lights and the iPhone charged up.
  
• User Interface (pedals, seat, handlebars): I think Apple could come up with some clever platform pedals that would work with street shoes but still have some restraint to allow pedaling efficiency. And the handlebars should be "fixie" style, perhaps with cell-foam padding so they could be used without gloves. The saddle is the real problem, because it needs to fulfill two conflicting requirements (1) be an iconic bike saddle; and (2) be comfortable. I think they'd have to do something like provide a "basic" saddle that has a proven comfort record like the Terry Liberator, and a "premium" saddle that is a Brooks classic leather saddle that comes fully broken in. (That will be an expensive extra cost option!)
• Accessories: I think fenders, yes; but rack, no. (Fenders are sexy, racks aren't.) Instead of selling racks and panniers, Apple could sell coordinated backpacks (they could re-brand this ergonomic German one). Lights front and rear, for sure, integrated into the frame. The really tough challenge is the security issue. You could easily design security to work for Mudville, but not so easy for Manhattan. And effective locks are so big and heavy. I think Apple might try a two-pronged approach: first, a frame design that integrated a solid locking bar that would allow you to use a small high-security lock rather than a U-bar lock, and secondly, something (again an extra cost option) that worked with the iPhone to transmit a "help" signal if the bike were being tampered with.
  

Whew. Quite a bike, huh? What should it sell for? I would say that it ought to sell slightly above the price range for Apple laptops, say $1900 to $3500 depending on the options. I daresay that Apple has enough economies of scale, manufacturing wise, to be able to pull this off, and to value-engineer it to make a profit. (That auto-shifter will be tricky to engineer for sure, but Apple's just the company to do it.)

An industrial designer who is really ready to take on the challenge of the Apple bike is the Swedish designer Erik Nohlin from Gothenburg. He entered his delightfully minimalist, well thought out "MuskOx" design in the Bicycle Design (blog) "Ultimate Commuter Bike" design contest. (He should have won in my opinion.) If Apple wanted to get into bikes, they should just hire this guy, give him the list of requirements, and fund him.

But, first things first, Apple. Before you can proceed on this project, you have to wrestle the "iBike" trademark (#3096850) away from Velocomp LLP, makers of the "iBike" cyclocomputers.

IKEA and bikes

This past weekend, I passed the architect's equivalent of the "busman's holiday", which is, I spent two days in New York City assembling IKEA furniture for my younger daughter who is moving into her own apartment in NYC to take her first job. (Big milestones, you will I hope agree, and particularly poignant on Mothers' Day weekend.)

I am continually impressed with IKEA's value-engineering of their product. Their simple idea is to deliver good design at the least cost. In this case, "good design" means not only visual appeal but also sturdiness without excess weight or material. These are big challenges also for bicycle design, and IKEA stands out as the world-wide champion of achieving this.

Their approach to value-engineering is relentless, and if you assemble (as I did) eight pieces of furniture and observe their VE technique, it's quite remarkable. In eight pieces of furniture, there was only one mistake in execution (a wrong-handed drawer glide was supplied.) The newer pieces used a composite, rather than all-metal, cam-lock mechanism that was lighter, cheaper (no doubt) and held just as tightly as the old all-metal ones. Perhaps most remarkably, in not one of the pieces I assembled (and I did everything from bookcase to desk to dining table to futon) was there either a hardware piece missing or extra.

It's extremely tempting to ask the question, "If IKEA made a bike, what would it be like?" I'm guessing the specs would be something like this:

• Two-piece reinforced resin 6 spoke wheels;
• Sealed press-in cartridge bearings everywhere;
• One wrench required to assemble the whole thing (probably 6mm);
• Internally geared 3 speed rear hub assembly, in-hub drum brakes front and rear;
• Single frame size (also reinforced resin or possibly TIG-welded aluminum);
• Size adjustments with extra-long, cuttable seatpost;
• Some innovate approach to a fork (maybe a motorcycle style double-post fork with resin crossbars) to eliminate the expensive headset arrangement;
• Single-chainwheel crank with either belt drive or lifetime lube chain;
• Standard saddle and pedal attachments to allow for customization / replacement;
• One-piece (i.e. non-demountable) bars, grips and brake lever assembly.
  

All flat-packed and user-assembled, of course. The price would I think be in about the $300 range. It's doable with the current technology (and with the VE technology that IKEA has already assembled.)

Then they should sponsor a team in the Tour. (I'm surprised they don't already -- they must have more money than God.)

David Lega: Motivation, Invention, Inspiration

My posts have been a little off this week, as I've been in Europe (Munich / Basel) at a series of management meetings for my job with Nemetschek North America, makers of the CAD product Vectorworks. (This product placement is done for the benefit of the GoogleSearch gurus in our marketing department. You know who you are :)

I attended, late last week, a remarkable motivation-type keynote talk by a world champion Paralympic athlete from Sweden named David Lega. David was born with massive physical disabilities as a result of a virus his mother contracted while pregnant. I won't go into detail on either his disabilities nor his many notable accomplishments, but rather direct you to his website so you can learn more. I will say that if you represent a company in need of a motivational speaker, David will provide an unforgettable talk. David is an athlete, an inventor, a writer, an entrepreneur, a force of nature.

What I want to focus on here is the vehicle that you see David using in the picture. It's a tricycle of unusual design. It is of David's invention (he said it was either the fourth or fifth generation, I don't remember exactly) and it's unique in the world. It's unique because of the unusual nature of David's disabilities. He has virtually no arm or hand function, so a conventional wheelchair (even an electric one with a hand control) is not useful. He's an active and accomplished athlete, so an electric chair with say a mouth control is not interesting nor attractive, because he wants to use the muscles he has (his legs have a limited range of motion).

Take a close look at it and you'll see it's a tricycle of (somewhat) standard layout, but lacking any sort of handlebar. This means that steering and propulsion are both accomplished with foot action. You push a little more with the right foot at just the right moment in the cycle to turn left, and vice versa to turn right. David has developed spectacular and perhaps unique capabilities with his feet, and watching him smoothly navigate this wheelchair around a room is quite remarkable. I wonder if all the people in the room appreciated the skills involved.

Final word on Stockholm

Before I leave it, a few last words on Stockholm:

Stockholm Bike Fashion: The "fixie" craze has yet to hit Stockholm the way it has in the US. If you have a single-speed, it's an standard* steel-frame, coaster-brake style. Other "standards" are three-speeds. (I would call an "standard" an "old person's bike" except that young people who are not bike enthusiasts ride them too. So they are just "standard".) Enthusiast bikes are derailleur-equipped late-model mountain bikes or road bikes with bright paint jobs. (I did see one Rohloff-equipped bike. Nice.) I saw aluminum, not carbon, frames in the display windows of the one bike shop I stopped at. As for couture, I saw only a few people wearing Spandex, and they were all club riders. For that matter, I was remarkable (even in my street clothes) for wearing gloves.

Infrastructure / Pedestrians: Bikeways, where they are uninterrupted, are great, e.g. along a waterfront, especially where there is some separation (other than a line of paint) from pedestrians. But they are always problematic where they end, or have to deal with intersections, or cross roads. There is a lot of "engineering" (signalization, signage, and control) involved. And the cyclist always has the option of using the roadway anyway. Just as in the US, delivery trucks and cars park in the bikeways, forcing the cyclist into the motorway. The adjacency of bikeways to pedestrian areas is problematic, I think bikes (moving at 10-20 mph) belong more with cars than with pedestrians. I found myself using my bell a lot.

*I've been, justly enough, taken to task for my earlier use of the term "ordinary", which historically refers to a "penny-farthing" type bicycle.

Stockholm Cyclist Holiday...

..well, it was really a business trip, but I was able to tack on a day to do an extensive tour of the city by bike. As I said in an earlier post, I'd never been in Sweden before. I found it very English-friendly. (This is good thing, as my Nordic is pretty non-existent. One of the weird things about visiting Sweden is that "Hello" in Nordic is "He!" pronounced "hey". It's tempting to just say "hey" right back, kind of comfortable and informal, until you realize that you're sending the wrong signal about which language you prefer.)

Stockholm has a lot of practical cyclists. It would not be hard to believe that (at least in the warm months) 20 to 25 8 to 10 percent of city-dwellers commute to work, or do at least some practical transportation on bikes. The city has an extensive network of bike lanes, and the sensible Swedes wear helmets in far greater proportion than I've seen elsewhere in Europe. I'd guess 50% of the urban riders I saw wore helmets, which may not sound like a lot, until you see Paris where the percentage is in the low (and I mean low) single digits.

Stockholm has a public bike-sharing system called "Stockholm City Bikes". It has been put together by Clear Channel advertising, who I think also did the Washington DC "SmartBike" system. The systems look pretty much identical: the bikes (3 speed w/ coaster brakes on the rear) are the same (see my post on SmartBike here), and the rental system is very similar, with a 3-hour usage limit. SCB is more tourist oriented, though, with a 3-day pass available (for between $15 and $20) at the central railway station.

I got a better deal than SCB, though. I got a free bike for two days from my hotel (a very nice central hotel called the Scandic Anglais). Evidently this is not unusual. The larger hotels keep a collection of bikes available for patron use, and you just check them out and a deposit is put on your hotel tab until you return them. Simple and convenient. The bikes are nothing special: one-speed "ordinaries" with rear coaster brake (coaster brakes suck, by the way) and drum brake on front, rack, mudguards, and lights. Pretty basic stuff, and not very different from what a lot of locals use on their own. Just guessing, I would say that about 50% of the locals were on "ordinaries" while the other half were on more high-tech modern bikes. I saw very few people on the SCBs. It was late September, and past the tourist "high season", so maybe that was it -- the SCBs were mainly for tourists.

The SCB website is here, but it's in the off-season now. Bikes are available only for seven months of the year, 3/31 to 10/31. I guess winters are pretty tough in Stockholm. One of my acquaintances there said he had a co-worker who put on studded tires and rode year-round, but he was considered extremely hard-core by his colleagues.

So, to document the holiday and encourage other tourist-cyclists in Stockholm, I've mapped my city tour on Google Maps below. My first day tour (8.5 miles, Friday afternoon) is in red, and my longer Saturday tour (19.5 miles) is in purple:

View Larger Map

..and, even more fun, have an annotated collection of "travelogue" photos on flickr here. You can click on the map link on each photo page to see where it was taken in Stockholm. I hope you enjoy seeing Sweden's capital by bike!