Designer Gianluca Gimini approached friends and strangers with pen, paper, and a challenge: Draw a bicycle from memory.
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After collecting hundreds of these sketches since 2009, Gimini decided to take them to the next level this year: Using his considerable design skills, Gimini rendered realistic versions of the bikes and presented them in a group he named Velocipedia.
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The results are stunning. “I became the executor of these two minute projects by people who were mainly non-designers and confirmed my suspicion: everyone, regardless of age and job, can come up with extraordinary, wild, new, and at times brilliant inventions.”
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Take the above drawing by a 24-year-old student.
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Under Gimini’s artistic influence, it becomes something amazing, albeit of dubious functionality.
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The above bike is missing a very important part of its frame.
“I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart,” he wrote.
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“Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request most people have a very hard time remembering exactly how a bike is made.”
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But while the drawings are technically flawed, they represent the incredible creativity and diversity of the human mind.
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“A single designer could not invent so many new bike designs in 100 lifetimes, and this is why I look at this collection in such awe,” Gimini wrote.
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Gimini collected some statistics during his project:
— Total number of collected bicycles: 376
— Youngest participant: 3 y.o.
— Oldest participant: 88 y.o.
— Different nationalities of participants: 7
— Bicycles facing left: 75 %
— Bicycles facing right: 25 %
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And from those stats, he was able to draw some conclusions:
“Some diversities are gender-driven,” he wrote. “Nearly 90% of drawings in which the chain is attached to the front wheel (or both to the front and the rear) were made by females. Men generally tend to place the chain correctly [but] they are more keen to over-complicate the frame.”
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One of the most frequent issues for participants, Gimini said, was not knowing exactly how to describe their job in short, something many people may relate to after filling out customs or census forms.
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But people’s occupations do seem to relate to the type of drawings they create.
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“The most unintelligible drawing has also the most unintelligible handwriting. It was made by a doctor,” he reports.
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Gimini’s project inspires such wild and out-of-the-box designs we just had to marvel at the finished renderings.
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Just check this one, drawn by a self-described “old grandpa.”
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Certainly not the most efficient design, but wonderful to look at.
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We hope Gimini continues his work. We could look at these all day.
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See Gianluca Gimini’s ‘Velocipedia’ project for the full back story and more renderings of these wild and lovable bikes.
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