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A Concept for a Waterborne, Eco-Friendly, Partial-DIY Vehicle for Developing Nations

Unless you’re Izzy Swan, a vehicle is something you buy. It’s ready to go; they’re turnkey affairs, which is probably where that phrase came from. But this interesting concept by a pair of industrial designers proposes an alternate system, whereby a corporation would sell the motive power and local communities would build the vehicle bodies themselves.

From Seoul-based WooSung Lee and ChanYeop Jeong comes this Bamboo Recumbent concept, their entry in the 2016 Michelin Design Challenge:

It was designed with a specific region in mind, the impoverished and flooding-prone Navotas region in the Philippines, where folks are reportedly living in conditions like this:

Navotas which is located in the central region of the Philippines. It’s a typical slum where 25 million people live in floating bamboo houses because Navotas is a flood-prone region.

When the rainy season begins, the whole village is covered with waste from the landfills. The whole village suffers from epidemics due to poor sanitation.

Lee and Jeong’s idea is that Michelin would manufacture a pedaling rig, similar to what you’d see on a recumbent bike, and provide it along with axles, a crankshaft and four paddle-wheel assemblies. The target user would then lash widely-available local bamboo into a structure that the Michelin components would integrate with.

Part of their concept entails kitting the raft out with a series of Lifestraw filters, the idea being that the craft would purify the water as it went along. Obviously this doesn’t seem realistic from a volume perspective, particularly after looking at those photos above, but this is a concept, after all.

Lee and Jeong took third place in the competition, whose theme was “Mobility for All.” You can see the rest of the entries here.