The Pitches
I’m amazed that we have reached the end of First Year so quickly and it was a joy to round off the year with the pitches of others in my cohort for their Victorian (or reimagined) machines.
The most immediately practical idea came from Mary who had an idea to create smart contact lenses which provide subtitles in real-time for a hearing impaired user. It struck me that this idea has the potential to be life changing for those who experience hearing loss.
Some years ago, during a particularly bad hearing infection, I lost almost all of my hearing for a few days and could only hear other by telephone. It was a frightening experience but one that has left me with great empathy for those unable to hear. In my own case, I ended up on a train that went to the wrong destination because I was unable to hear the announcement that a service change meant only certain carriages would be going to my preferred destination. Mary’s subtitles would have improved my experience of temporary deafness considerably.
Others in the team – Josh and Tony – had great ideas to improve the experience of those using gaming platforms. Sadly, gaming has kind of passed me by and it is not a world I understand but I am in no doubt that, in future, gamers will benefit greatly from these thoughtful ideas.
Both Tyler and Ivanusa had ideas for practical, real world items brough up to date. Tyler is a fan of physical video and audio and had come up with a design for a modernised CD player – or what those of my vintage might call, a music centre. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if I’d met him a year earlier, I could have given him all the top of the range audio equipment he could imagine during the house clearance of a relative. At the time, I quite literally could not give it away.
Iva’s idea was a clock – designed tastefully in Victorian style with a modern twist – which supported people to manage their time effectively around life tasks. Her design had her young son in mind and I think she has created an idea which could be beneficial across the age ranges – it struck me that as well as reminding young people of when to leave for school etc., it would have a use for older people to remember to take medication of those with dementia to receive a prompt around day-to-day activites.
Katie’s Smart Fridge combined the old with the new. A particular feature from ‘back in the day’ was rotating shelves. I have never seen that in a fridge but it feels like such a good idea and is both simple and incredibly smart despite being very much an analogue improvement. I like the idea of a fridge that helps to manage the family menu – one that could discourage random picking would be welcomed here too! (Maybe an idea for the second edition!)
I enjoyed the opportunity to present my Victorian Smart Bike idea – I made the presentation quite a bit shorter than the version already up loaded to my blog and welcomed the feedback from my colleagues.
The Victorian Smart Bicycle 2085: A Final Reflection
This project started with a simple challenge: take an old piece of technology and reimagine it for the future. What followed was a full-speed descent into fun, brass-fitted madness. Taking the 1885 bicycle and pedalling it two hundred years forward into a world without cars, the idea grew through several stages, each one building on what came before and fixing what had punctured along the way.
What went well
The big idea held up – mixing Victorian style with far-future technology delivered on the bicycle’s original promise, giving ordinary people the joy of getting around freely. 2085 might finally be the moment the promise of the bicycle was finally realised.
My favourite aspect of the ‘design’ is the Homing Pigeon – in a highly digital world, that the bike’s engineering team still communicates by carrier pigeon is both paradoxical and makes the point that there will always be some interdependence between all of us who live on this planet. It will land in 2085. Pigeons are eternal.
Framing everything as a virtual user manual was also a smart gear change. It gave the project a clear shape that made every chapter and every joke feel like it belonged there.
What could have been better
Honestly, I think the project became a strong creative vision and I did not worry too much about the technical deliverability of the 2085 design – it was intended as a vision of what *might* be possible in the future. With a longer project it might be possible to make the case that the bike’s more outlandish features would actually work in 2085.
The pitching process itself taught a valuable lesson about cutting back. The second version got badly bogged down in theory and would probably have been shown the door before reaching the top of the hill. Rebuilding a leaner third version was the right call. Over-explaining what you love is a very easy chain to get stuck in.
How it felt
Building all of this with a love of cycling but no technical knowledge of bicycles was a fun experience – in this project it was my imagination that made the running and as someone who does not always ‘think out of the box’ this was a rewarding experience and felt a bit like cresting a very steep climb.
The best decision was to lean into the silliness rather than brake. Victorian stuffiness and radical futurism turn out to be a perfect tandem pair, and discovering that produced something genuinely hard to put in a box. Or a pannier. For a speculative design project, that is probably the best result of all.
And finally
Image: The late Jack Gellatly 1913 – 1991 photo taken c. 1930
Cycling has been part of my life since I was just a few years old and I have always had a bike – though I am generally a cycling for transport rider rather than a MAMIL (Middle Aged Man in Lycra). I remember listening to my Grandfather’s stories of cycling as a young man with a cycling club in Edinburgh and it was as a result of one the club outings that he met my Grandmother. Apart from a few years with a Vespa scooter, the bicycle was the only personal transport my Grandparents ever used. Perhaps they were pioneers and would look fondly on the world of 2085.
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