Quick and fun touring survey!please share your opinions

[cycle-design]

Hello all,

My name is Rob Ellis and I am working on my final year product design degree project at Coventry University to design an adventure/touring cycle. Thank you very much for some very useful feedback to my threads and for the wealth of information on the site in general, very much appreciated.
Now that I have lots of opinions from helpful cyclists it would be great to quantify some of this data and to start getting feedback that can be transferred into a design spec. Therefore I wondered if you would mind sparing 2 or three minutes to complete a simple online survey. The website is safe and popup free and created with an account held by myself.

Simply click on the link below and follow the steps in the survey.


http://FreeOnlineSurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=ghh7z881htk2poo504768

If you have any difficulty viewing the survey, alternatively copy and paste the link into your web browser.


It would be great if you could forward this email and link to any other like-minded expedition/adventure touring cyclists or cycle campers that you may know outside of this site.
Once again thank you very much for your time and input.

Rob Ellis

 

[Bigtallfatbloke]

ok i did it

 

[Kirstie]

As with another survey which was posted in cafe a couple of weeks ago, did you ask admin first?

 

[mickle]

Forgive my cynicism but;

Why are you thanking us for our responses to your threads on this board when you appear to be a first time poster.

Many world class designers have tried and failed to improve on 'the bicycle', Starck, Newson and Guigaro to name just three. Clive Sinclair has done it twice! What makes you think that you can bring anything new to a field which has seen 100 years of painstaking trial and error by the best minds in the industry? There already exists a broad range of well developed equipment for touring cyclists, designed not by designers but by engineers. A bicycle, unlike a kettle a table lamp or even a car is emphatically not a styling exercise but a collection of individual engineering solutions. The last thing a touring cyclist needs is a modular folding injection-molded mag-wheeled trifle in lime green and puce with built in camera and fibre optic internet connection. Like the kind of abortion routinely trotted out by industrial design students here;

http://design.runride.com/

As a former Industrial Design Engineering student at Central.

 

[mickle]

More evidence, if it were needed;

http://www.cyclechat.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=21839

And

http://www.design-italia.it/inglese/dettaglio.htm?tipo=scelti&idx=278

And

http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_set.asp?individual_id=122283&set_id=185131

 

[Anthony]

Done. But some of the questions were a but rubbish.

 

[Bigtallfatbloke]

..well I dont think its about re designing the wheel..it's probably about getting through a uni course which is fair enuff

 

[CycleTourer]

Forgive my cynicism but;

Why are you thanking us for our responses to your threads on this board when you appear to be a first time poster.

Many world class designers have tried and failed to improve on 'the bicycle', Starck, Newson and Guigaro to name just three. Clive Sinclair has done it twice! What makes you think that you can bring anything new to a field which has seen 100 years of painstaking trial and error by the best minds in the industry? There already exists a broad range of well developed equipment for touring cyclists, designed not by designers but by engineers. A bicycle, unlike a kettle a table lamp or even a car is emphatically not a styling exercise but a collection of individual engineering solutions. The last thing a touring cyclist needs is a modular folding injection-molded mag-wheeled trifle in lime green and puce with built in camera and fibre optic internet connection. Like the kind of abortion routinely trotted out by industrial design students here;

http://design.runride.com/

As a former Industrial Design Engineering student at Central.

I have spent the last 25 years as a Design and Technology teacher trying to develop students design creativity and it is cynics like you who stifle young designers with your arrogant 'It's been done before and by better people than you so naff off' approach. Give the lad a break and stop being so cynical.

 

[maurice]

Give the lad a break and stop being so cynical.

He posted a carbon copy on a motorcycle forum I frequent, didn't even bother to check the picture of a motorbike in the corner!

 

[CycleTourer]

He posted a carbon copy on a motorcycle forum I frequent, didn't even bother to check the picture of a motorbike in the corner!

Obviously the lad is a little misguided in his approach and obviously needs a bit of guidance from his tutor, but there is still no reason to be cynical and poo poo any attempts try new design ideas.

 

[Muddyfox]

I have spent the last 25 years as a Design and Technology teacher trying to develop students design creativity

Not to mention a wealth of experience in the Saddle .. I'm still very much enjoying reading through your website

And who knows maybe Cycle-design will come up with one simple thing that makes some part of touring easier or more enjoyable ?

Simon

 

[Bigtallfatbloke]

Like hydrogen filled Pannier liners?

 

[mickle]

I have spent the last 25 years as a Design and Technology teacher trying to develop students design creativity and it is cynics like you who stifle young designers with your arrogant 'It's been done before and by better people than you so naff off' approach. Give the lad a break and stop being so cynical.

You have managed to ignore my point altogether, I'm not saying that 'it' has been done before I'm saying that perhaps one in a hundred industrial designers who turn their attention to cycles produces anything of value. For the most part they are confections and trifles. A bicycle isn't like a washing machine or a car or a toaster, last years internals wrapped up in a shiny new box, a bicycle is primarily an engineering solution. Form following function. My criticism is of the arrogance of designers who imagine they can re-invent the bike because as far as I can remember the only such cycle which made it from inside the head of a designer to the street is the Strida. And it is a total piece of crap whose limited success can only be attributed to the fact that it looks good (to some).

We shall see (if he has the courtesy to show us his finished project after racking our brains), I'd applaud a design which brought genuine innovation but I strongly suspect it'll be just another lovely magic marker rendering of an utterly impractical folly. A styling exercise. I hope he proves me wrong.

I'm not criticising 'the lad', I wish him well, I'm criticising a system which churns out hundreds of 'creative' little designer units with no engineering background.

 

[mickle]

And isn't the first thing you teach them how to take criticism?