#HTE

Product Designer Renders Laypeople’s Inaccurate Bicycle Sketches

Ever play Pictionary with someone who can’t draw? It’s excruciating, no? Now imagine these non-drawers were tasked with concept development and it was your job to render them.

Product designer Gianluca Gimini has capitalized on the limited abilities of non-drawers in order to create Velocipedia, his wonderful, six-year-long rendering project. “Back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers,” Gimini writes. “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. 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. Some did get close, some actually nailed it perfectly, but most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle.”

Gimini then rendered these sketches, to hilarious effect:

Some of these actually look pretty wicked. And to be clear Gimini, for his part, is not mocking these folks’ work, but appreciating it. “I collected hundreds of drawings, building up a collection that I think is very precious,” he explains. “There is an incredible diversity of new typologies emerging from these crowd-sourced and technically error-driven drawings. 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.”