The Oregon Manifest "Bike Design Project"

THE BIKE DESIGN PROJECT

Five Teams. Five Cities.

The Ultimate Urban Utility Bike.

The Bike Design Project is an independent innovation platform for the urban utility bike. We’ve partnered high-level design firms with American bicycle craftsmen to collaboratively develop the next-wave urban bike. Five teams from five cycling-centric cities are competing to concept, create and champion their unique vision of tomorrow’s bicycle for the everyday rider. The results will redefine the category and have the potential to reshape urban mobility itself.

A Better Bike – Every Day

The two-wheeled revolution isn’t going to roll out on niche or specialty bikes. It’s going to be born on the streets, and it will be spread by the urban rider.

Most people want to lead healthier, more sustainable lives, yet they don’t consider themselves “cyclists”. The Bike Design Project is aimed at these citizen riders – inciting the creation of new bike designs that meet their everyday needs and provide a better transportation experience.

The New Development Model

It’s a new era in product development. Today, when people aren’t satisfied with what the market offers they can independently create the products they want to see. The Bike Design Project is part of this movement – working outside the system to spark innovation and create a new generation of useful bicycles.

Building it Real

This competition isn’t on paper. Each team is developing a fully functional, road-tested prototype. High design and deep craft combine to create a very real and viable end product.

From Competition to Production

Through our innovative partnership with Fuji Bikes, the winning bike design will move from concept to production, arriving at bike shops in 2015.

We’ll be giving away three of these bikes along the way to the reveal date for the five designs, so stay connected with us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for details.

You Decide the Winner

This competition is about creating a bike that you’ll want to ride daily, so you’re choosing the winner.  Everyone gets a vote – pick the bike you want to see go from concept and design to retail availability.

The Teams 

MINIMAL

About MINIMAL

MINIMAL is a Chicago-based studio creating iconic, disruptive, brand-building products and experiences that connect emotionally with users. We are a collective of top cross-disciplinary design risk-takers and doers infused with entrepreneurial drive. Disrupting the norm, creating meaningful change and delighting the user are our passions. This is embedded in our DNA and our unique hybrid business model that combines consulting with global brands, venture partnerships and our own self-incubated in-house brands. From brand-defining icons and game-changing new product eco-systems for companies like Xbox, Microsoft, Google, Dell, Coalesse and Apple, to exploring uncharted territory on riskier ventures with start-ups and entrepreneurs, our award-winning work spans a diverse range of industries from technology, medical and consumer products to lifestyle, furniture and environments.

As a pioneer and amplifier of the crowd-funding movement, MINIMAL is vested in the evolution of this emerging paradigm through ambitious projects and partnerships. MINIMAL is led by Smithsonian National Design Award winner and former Nike Global Creative Director Scott Wilson.

About Method Bicycle, Garry Alderman

Educated as an architect and a craftsman, I have always been making things, and continually in pursuit of dedicating my life to a craft that could give me the right outlet. I have found the bicycle is perfect for combining the designed object and the act of making, with a unique emotional connection to the world around us like nothing else. There is something elegant about the simplicity of the machine that is a bicycle, yet there seems to be a lifetime of work in it, which is what really excites me.

I am not interested in sitting behind a desk. Instead, my fulfillment comes from holding a torch or a file in hand and running a one-person shop. I plan to keep it that way for some time, as I feel it allows me to have a greater connection to what I’m doing. Things take more time that way, but for me it’s about doing things with intent, quality and pride. I am not concerned with how many frames come out of my shop; rather it’s about intensely focusing on everything I do – my job is never finished. Each frame is built one at a time, with a unique combination of material, process and experience in each build.

Framebuilding is anything but easy, but the rewards I get from this craft are unlike anything else. From designing each build with the client, laying out the frame drawing and machining the tubes, to laying a precise braze and polishing a frame before paint, it gives me a personal satisfaction at the end of each day when I can turn off the lights and say to myself, “I am proud of what I do.”

Pensa

Pensa was founded in 2005, born out of love and determination to improve quality of life through better products and better business choices. We believe great design can deliver experiences that don’t force a compromise on value, the environment or social impact.

Marco Perry, Kathy Larchian and Mark Prommel lead Pensa’s creative team and have worked together since 1999. We maintain a boutique size because we believe it allows us to focus on our team, our clients and our passion for solving problems.

Pensa believes the world can be continuously improved through great design and a bit of clever invention. Many products today are incomplete solutions, complex contraptions, forgotten cheap commodities or accepted nuisances, and we can’t help but try to fix them. We love to design solutions by implementing new technologies, synthesizing complex systems and re-designing often overlooked everyday household objects. Making product experiences simple, elegant and delightful is deceivingly difficult; it takes dedication and passion to protect a vision.

The Pensa team is inquisitive, empathetic and engaging by nature. This leads us to tackle a diverse range of projects such as Street Charge, our public solar charging station, D.I.Wire, the first desktop CNC wire bender, mobile phones for Samsung, future technology concepts for Panasonic and Pepsi, an entirely new brand of tools for Mr. LongArm, and a strategy to make the workplace more age-friendly for the New York Academy of Medicine.

About Horse Cycles

Horse Cycles produces precision handmade bicycles out of Brooklyn, New York. Each bike is designed and built by Thomas Callahan in his Brooklyn workshop, where the idea of quality is always present. Horse Cycles are made in the USA – made with heart for the riders who love them.

Thomas Callahan started Horse Cycles – a custom-made bike shop – because he was obsessed. “When I started making the bikes, I just had no control over it. I was so excited. I couldn’t sleep at night.” Callahan, who has a background in fine arts, started handcrafting bikes at a time when his career as an artist was leaving him unfulfilled. “I needed something where I could make a connection with other people. It’s like playing music by yourself or playing with a group of people, it’s all just multiplied when you have positive relationships and are interacting with the whole community.”

The passion Callahan felt when he started his shop is in evidence years later as he talks about the newest endeavor for Horse Cycles, the Urban Tour Project. The frame’s elegance lies in its simplicity and its attention to detail. Although this will be Horse Cycle’s first bike not made start to finish by Callahan’s capable hands, his influence is evident in the prototype’s beauty.

INDUSTRY is an innovation accelerator based in Portland, Oregon. As a multi-disciplinary group of experts, our focus is to identify new opportunities and define what’s next for organizations. We make brands, products, digital, environments and services truly better. Drawing from many years of experience consulting for companies both large and small, our work begins at the core of the design challenge and bridges the gap between strategy and action.

About Ti Cycles.

In the mid-80s, Dave Levy began his bike building career studying the basics of construction technique, geometry, and the science of bicycle fit from resident frame builders in Seattle. In 1990 Dave founded Ti Cycles as a means of focusing on constructing lighter, higher-performance frames made from titanium. Today he is driven by a passion for helping people at all skill levels become more comfortable and efficient on touring, sport, racing, mountain and tandem bicycles.

HUGE Design

About HUGE Design

HUGE Design combines cultural insights, professional intuition and a no-nonsense approach to create award-winning products and experiences. Partners Bill Webb and Chris Harsacky left their creative leadership positions at Astro Studios, founding HUGE in the summer of 2010. Since its inception, HUGE has had the privilege of collaborating with industry giants such as Samsung, Microsoft, Nike, Google and HP while collaborating with younger companies Sonos and GoPro.

Our approach leverages a lean process stripped of fluff and driven by a results-oriented attitude toward problem-solving. As many other industrial design firms seek to expand their capabilities into halo services such as branding and marketing, our focus on product design is clear and uncompromised.

Located in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco, a small open-air studio acts as a pressure cooker for fresh ideas. Designers at HUGE live and breathe the culture and lifestyle of their high-tech city and are united by a shared passion for the old-school craft of making real things… really cool. HUGE has proved through hard work and determination that a small yet talented team can generate big results in a crowded field of world-class Bay Area creative consultancies.

About 4130 Cycle Works

Tom Schoeniger has been deep inside bicycle fabrication since 1989, learning from some of the most storied first-generation California frame builders. His experience spans working with small boutique builders to the largest bicycle frame fabricator on the West Coast.

After a foray into aircraft frame fabrication, Tom returned to bicycle building through his instructor position in the industrial design department at a design university in San Francisco – teaching product and transportation design students to design and fabricate a bicycle frame from scratch.

In 2008 he started 4130 Cycle Works, specializing in classic-looking bicycles made with the highest-quality, modern materials, but fabricated using 100-year-old silver-soldered, lugged construction.

About PCH Lime Lab – Team Collaborator

Our passion is making. Our expertise is engineering. PCH Lime Lab helps companies get to market on time with the right product. The company is known for its design, engineering and technical talent, and state-of-the-art prototyping facility in Potrero Hill, San Francisco.

Lime Lab is partnering with the SF Team, providing engineering talent and the fabrication facility to create the SF bike.

Founded in 1926 by design pioneer Walter Dorwin Teague, TEAGUE is the original design consultancy. As proof, our portfolio spans many firsts: the Polaroid camera, the UPS truck, Texaco-branded service stations, the Pringles canister and the Xbox. Along the way, we’ve designed the interior of every Boeing commercial airplane ever produced—including the revolutionary 787 Dreamliner.

At TEAGUE we make things—whether they’re products, services or experiences. We do this through interdisciplinary teams of industrial designers, interaction designers, researchers, strategists, engineers and other talents spanning everything from branding to robotics. This imperative to make things is driven by our belief in connecting strategy with execution. We call this approach “thinking through making,” and it’s at the heart of everything we do.

About Sizemore Bicycle

The first time Taylor Sizemore rode a bike without training wheels he ran into the side of an Econoline van; the second time, he tried to do a wheelie and still has the scar to prove it. After that he was hooked—which naturally led to the formation of Sizemore Bicycle, Taylor’s one-man shop located in the heart of Seattle’s creative Fremont neighborhood.

Sizemore’s sweet spot is the everyday bike, Taylor’s favorite type to build. His everyday bikes are for cycling enthusiasts who want a custom bicycle that corresponds just as much to the way they live as it does to the way they ride. Sizemore Bicycle is an independent custom bike shop that’s been dedicated to quality and craftsmanship since 2008.

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