VBike: Bike Design Concept
For this second unit of Design and Engineering, we learned about how engineers design bikes. We went on several Field Experiences to different bike shops and had designers come in to talk to us about the design of bikes and how that whole process works. At Earth Rider and Working Bikes, we learned about how bikes are made and repaired, and also went out and rode a brand-new type of bike called e-bikes that use electricity to help you pedal.
For this Action Project, Better Bikes, as part of a team we brainstormed and developed a custom bike design to best meet the needs of a specific user. The persona that my team was assigned for this project was Vanessa. She has a younger sibling that she needs to take to daycare every morning, and they need to also deal with potholes and loud cars and trains around them. She also has to work around there not being any space inside her home, so she have to lock her bike up outside instead of bringing it inside.
Our new bike design is needed because it helps people like Vanessa that need more storage space both on their bike and in their house. The benefit of using our bike over a regular one and the reasoning behind the design is because of how the bike is designed. It is designed to be resistant to potholes through suspension, carry extra cargo or passengers in the rear storage box, and easy to store because the bike's lightweight frame is able to fold up.
I interviewed a biker while doing research for this project. SH said that “The most irritating part of a bike is mechanical failure.” It helped inspire our design because we wanted to make our bike as mechanically sound as possible, through making it pothole resistant and durable.
Below is a shared slideshow between myself and my partner, ALL, which contains the images and calculations required for our bike design.
In conclusion, I thought that this Action Project was interesting and fun to work on with another person, although it was a bit difficult to properly communicate concepts and split the workload between two people. I learned that properly designing something, especially a bike, is actually a lot tougher than you'd think it would be. There's a lot you've got to take into account. I also learned a lot about empathy and learning to put myself in another person's shoes so that we could learn to help them deal with their problems.
For this Action Project, Better Bikes, as part of a team we brainstormed and developed a custom bike design to best meet the needs of a specific user. The persona that my team was assigned for this project was Vanessa. She has a younger sibling that she needs to take to daycare every morning, and they need to also deal with potholes and loud cars and trains around them. She also has to work around there not being any space inside her home, so she have to lock her bike up outside instead of bringing it inside.
Our new bike design is needed because it helps people like Vanessa that need more storage space both on their bike and in their house. The benefit of using our bike over a regular one and the reasoning behind the design is because of how the bike is designed. It is designed to be resistant to potholes through suspension, carry extra cargo or passengers in the rear storage box, and easy to store because the bike's lightweight frame is able to fold up.
I interviewed a biker while doing research for this project. SH said that “The most irritating part of a bike is mechanical failure.” It helped inspire our design because we wanted to make our bike as mechanically sound as possible, through making it pothole resistant and durable.
Below is a shared slideshow between myself and my partner, ALL, which contains the images and calculations required for our bike design.
In conclusion, I thought that this Action Project was interesting and fun to work on with another person, although it was a bit difficult to properly communicate concepts and split the workload between two people. I learned that properly designing something, especially a bike, is actually a lot tougher than you'd think it would be. There's a lot you've got to take into account. I also learned a lot about empathy and learning to put myself in another person's shoes so that we could learn to help them deal with their problems.
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