Swurve Bike

Instead of redesigning gardening tools for elderly people, in this unit of Design and Engineering we innovated a bike based off of a specific persona that was assigned to us. This unit focused on diameter, circumference, kinetic and potential energy, volume and surface area. We focused on what it means to create a prototype and improve one feature after the other to achieve an ideal design.

Our Field Experiences included multiple speakers and business women, such as BFF Bikes 'founder', a DIVVY bikes representative, and a Dyson engineer.  BFF Bikes is a bike shop created by two women with a goal to include a woman's anatomy into a bike's design. In the clothing industry, pants are created differently for men and women. Similarly, they brought awareness to body types. We visited a bike shop named On the Route Bicycles where there were many types of innovated products. There was a display of E-bikes, mountain bikes, hybrids, blue-tooth bike helmets, and new recent designs. With this assignment, empathy was practiced once more on an environmentally safe mode of transportation. From my research I have learned about the Smog bike, invented for ventilation of polluted air as the rider pedals. The inventors built a filter on the front frame, producing clean air with environmental friendly transportation. I also learned of an organization that created bikes for people in third world countries who weren't able to reach their destinations efficiently and had no vehicle.

I interviewed a biker who owned a Schwinn beach cruiser. They said that, "Biking made me a safer driver because I'm not worried about what I'm gonna do, I'm worried about the car that pulls up at the intersection, I'm worrying about the person that's gonna come out and make a left turn and cut me off. That's part of why I got the beach cruiser because it's so slow, that I'm not going fast so I have time to stop." My interviewee's bike was heavy but with non puncturing wheels and a steady single speed gear. Our persona was a 13 year old girl named Vanessa who deals with a pot hole terrain as she bikes next to traffic driving underneath an elevated train track. When renovating this bike we had to keep in mind that Vanessa has a baby brother to transport to day care, so safety is much more important than speed. Stability and smooth travel was essential.