Sydney designers unplugged: people, process, product



Sandy McNeil, Director, Nielsen Design Associates,
talks about the bicycle project

The most innovative thing about the frame was it uses traditional sailboard manufacturing technology to make a bicycle frame – and that’s what’s quirky about it.

You can see pretty directly how this is the kind of construction of some windsurfers & surfboards and such like – styrofoam for buoyancy and lightness, and then fibreglass from windsurfers and sailboards as skin. And so it was – how do we use that technology to make a bicycle frame – that’s the challenge. And of course here’s the solution.

The early part right up until 30 or 40 percent of the way through the project we were thinking it would be a bike used by people who enjoyed beach culture. It had a belt drive system so there was no lubrication involved so that if you wanted to take your bike on the beach, you could, which is something you traditionally don’t do. Anyone knows that if you take your bike on the beach you get sand in the chain and it’s a mess. But as a beach culture bike it would be incredibly advantageous to have a dry non-lubricated drive system. And similarly with the gears, the gears are a fully sealed unit. So a number of things at the outset which were beach culture oriented meant we took the development in a particular direction.

There was a big crossover in between the population of people who use bicycles and the population of people who use windsurfers, snowboards and skateboards. Those people would like to take their bike on the beach – that was the assumption and I’m sure they would. That didn’t continue for a whole bunch of commercial and marketing reasons.

It became an urban sports bike. So it wasn’t a mountain bike, it wasn’t intended to be a downhill mountain bike. It was intended to be just a fantastic looking, simple looking, elegant solution for a bicycle. There’s no grease to get on your trousers, it folded up it so you could put it in the boot of your car. It offered some advantages that no one else could easily deliver. But it had to be great looking – it really had to be an expression of carbon fibre technology.