Bike parts that grow like weeds

Submitted by GlimmerGuy on 08/12/2010 – 3:13 pmAdd comment

When I set out to write Glimmer, I swore I’d never write about chair or bike design. That kind of design is already endlessly analyzed on design blogs, and didn’t really seem to have much to do with the kind of “problem-solving” design I was going to cover in Glimmer.

Of course, I soon quickly broke my own rule, both in the book and on this site. For instance, the very first anecdote in the first chapter of Glimmer focuses at length on the iBot wheelchair designed by Dean Kamen. The seat raises its occupant to a standing position, as the wheels intrepidly roll up and over curbs or steps. That’s the kind of chair that certainly meets the “life transforming” criteria.

And in my Resources section of Glimmer I mentioned The Bamboo Bike project, a worthy endeavor by scientists and engineers at the Earth Institute at Columbia University that aims to implement cargo bikes made of bamboo as a sustainable form of transportation in Africa.

Now the bamboo bikes, made from one of the world’s fastest-growing and lightweight plants, have really caught on here in America, at least according to the recent “Just Don’t Let the Panda Borrow Your Bicycle” article in the NY Times. The number of bamboo bicycle makers is exploding, and many of them offer workshops to others eager to learn how to put together their own bamboo bikes.

(While these hand-crafted bikes here in the U.S. remain very expensive, it’s nice to read that some of these bike makers are still interested in distributing these bikes as a cheap, accessible transportation vehicle in developing countries.)

These bamboo bikes match the criteria, as spelled out by Bruce Mau in his urgent essay in Glimmer “Yes is More,” for making sustainability attractive. “Seduction, not sacrifice,” he decrees. In other words, functional + beauty = consumer desire. In the NY Times piece, the young bamboo bike retailer Nick Frey gets it: “A lot of people think of bamboo as furniture or cheap fencing. But bamboo is one of the strongest natural materials known to man. Plus the bikes look really cool.”