The Old Times

The VICTORIAN Smart Bike – Preparing The Pitch

7^th April 2026

Wasn’t keen on the initial design as it was too ‘dark satanic’ rather than cutting edge Victorian engineering to my mind. I decided to retain the opening slide’s look and feel while attempting a lighter, less complicated appearance for the presentation as a whole.

In my second iteration, I got too bogged down with the concept and theory and my feeling was that those listening to the pitch would perhaps understand a lot about bicycles and their history as well as some of the technical details behind the features I’d like to see for The Victorian but would have little idea of what it might actually be. I felt this second iteration would fail the ‘Dragons Den’ so I decided that ‘I’m out’ and decided to try for a third time.

Version 3 was much stronger and gives me plenty of scope of images and possibly videos and other media too.

My objective was to design a Powerpoint presentation called ‘The Victorian Smart Bike’ which is a speculative design set in 2085 which answers, albeit indirectly through notes rather than the slides themselvels the following questions:

1. What concepts, theories of humans from the lectures and reading have influenced my project?
2. Key practitioners that influenced my project?
3. Examples of old tech and emerging media that is influencing this project?
4. How successful do I believe this proposal is?
5. What feedback do my audience have on this pitch? 

The slides were designed on PowerPoint – with AI help – using the following summary of the project:

The Victorian Smart Bike in 60 Seconds

In 1885, a man named John Kemp Starley built a bicycle in Coventry that changed the world. Not because it was fast. Because it was for everyone. It gave women freedom. It gave working people mobility. It gave humanity its first real taste of joyful, independent movement.

Two hundred years later, the car is gone, the cities are ours again, and cycling is the centre of daily life. But here’s the problem nobody is talking about: the bikes are boring. They’re functional. They’re forgettable. They move people’s bodies and nothing else.

The Victorian moves everything else.

It knows your emotional state and adjusts your route accordingly. It synchronises your family’s heartbeats on a Sunday ride. It powers your neighbour’s breakfast. It lets you race Pogačar up a mountain – and lose, gloriously, in full sensory immersion. Its frame changes colour when you’re happy. Its Butler delivers notifications of such magnificent pomposity that people read them aloud to strangers.

It is, in a word, alive.

I am not pitching you a bicycle. I am pitching you the most significant object in the most significant century of cycling – a machine worthy of the world that built it.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to commission The Victorian.

It’s whether 2085 can afford not to have it.

10 Bullet Points for To Pitch

1. The timing is the product. The Victorian arrives at the precise cultural moment when humanity has solved the practical problem of transport and is now hungry for meaning, beauty, and joy in how it moves. This isn’t a bike for getting somewhere. It’s a bike for being somewhere.
2. Victorian aesthetics aren’t nostalgia – they’re a statement. In a world of frictionless, invisible, forgettable technology, The Victorian is unapologetically tactile, crafted, and present. It will be the most beautiful object most people own. That matters enormously to 2085 consumers.
3. It’s the only vehicle that knows you. Not your preferences, not your search history you. Your emotional state, your cellular health, your family’s biorhythms, your subconscious desires. Every other transport system moves your body. The Victorian moves your whole self.
4. The social network is built into the machine. The SVN (Social Velocipede Network) doesn’t require a phone, a screen, or a separate subscription. The ride is the broadcast. The experience is the content. This is the first genuinely post-smartphone social platform, and it comes with wheels.
5. It generates more than it consumes. The Atmospheric Energy Array means every Victorian on the road is a net contributor to the city grid. Commission enough of them and the fleet powers the neighbourhood. This is the only luxury product that pays its own way environmentally.
6. Family technology that actually works. Every family product ever made has been designed for the average family. The Victorian’s Constellation Module physically reconfigures for your family, whatever shape it takes. Six profiles, six needs, one quantum algorithm that satisfies all of them simultaneously.
7. The aspirational ceiling is Pogačar. The Champion’s Echo feature means every rider, — regardless of ability, has access to the greatest cyclist of the age as a training partner, motivator, and presence. The gap between the amateur and the elite has never been this beautifully, meaningfully bridged.
8. Wonder Credits replace the attention economy. The Victorian doesn’t reward engagement, it rewards living well. Discovering beauty. Helping people. Attempting ridiculous climbs. This is a values system embedded in a product, and in 2085 that is extraordinarily rare and commercially powerful.
9. The Butler makes it unforgettable. Features can be copied. The Victorian Butler cannot. An AI with genuine wit, warmth, and Victorian gravitas delivering personalised notifications is the kind of product personality that creates lifelong loyalty and relentless word of mouth. People will quote it to their friends.
10. This is the bicycle that John Kemp Starley would recognise and could never have imagined. And that tension, that paradox, is the whole product. Two hundred years of cycling’s promise, finally, completely, beautifully kept.

Before starting work on the images to accompany the presentation, I have prepared a leaflet/handout which summarises the key points of the project:

I appreciate that it does not contain a lot of information but the intention behind it is to leave a few ‘aides memoire’ with the potential customer so that they have a way to revisit their favourite features of the bike.

My objective for tomorrow is to build upon the current draft of the presentation and begin creating the digital ‘assets’ which will enable the pitch to come to life.