Hasta La Ideas

Every few weeks I get a request for information about the classic frog FZ750 concept designed by our founder Hartmut Esslinger in 1985. The frog FZ was a bit of a superstar, appearing on the cover of various magazines including Cycle World in the United States and Motorad in Germany. In 1990 it appeared on the cover of Businessweek with Esslinger. Hartmut was the only living designer thus honored since Raymond Loewy in 1934. I always felt the frog FZ, sometimes called “The Rana,” was special for a few reasons. Being designed in 1985, just three years after frog entered into its contract with Apple and opened the California studio, it was the personification of the hopes, dreams, and ambitions of frog at that time. It also influenced the generation of mortorbikes that followed. The Honda Hurricane was so influenced by the frog FZ that Honda offered one to Hartmut as a gift!

After having a prominent place in our client area for the last twenty five years, we prepared the frog FZ to enter the permant collection of the SFMOMA this month. There it will be on display as the iconic part of design history it is. As part of the restoration and preparation process, we spoke with Hartmut to document the entire story on how the FZ came to be. Read the following for the full scoop:

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Most of the sexy bike news we’ve reported on lately is aimed at the younger cyclist; wicked as it looks, your average senior citizen will not be throwing one leg over the Silver Flyer fixie. “Women and men stop buying bikes as they age, because they fear starting and stopping and getting on and off,” retiree Bill Becker told a local paper from his South Carolina town.

Becker, a retired auto assembly line worker, therefore created a bicycle with an innovative and elderly-friendly seat. By flipping a thumb lever on the handlebars, riders can raise or lower the seat on the fly or at rest, making mounting and dismounting an unintimidating affair. A pneumatic air pump does the lifting.

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I’ve long been enamored with Streetsblog‘s coverage of urbanism, policy, infrastructure and alternative transportation—in short, the future of mobility—and their film production division Streetsfilms is a nice complement to their bread-and-butter of timely transpo-centric online journalism. Their latest video, “From the Netherlands to America: Translating the World’s Best Bikeway Designs,” is no exception:

If you can make it through a 13-minute video, you can make it through Tom’s article and hopefully mine too…

This, of course, is the first of the two possibilities for the future of transportation, one that has been fully realized in at least one highly-developed country. For the Dutch, there is no such thing as “cycling culture”; it’s simply part of the urban fabric, as much a part of their cities as cars, buses, pedestrians… or even the architecture or weather: cyclists exist, no two ways about it.

Still, I’d be lying if I said that the organic (for lack of a better term) traffic patterns in the video [2:57; 6:21–6:48] led me to discover this computer simulation of driverless vehicles… it also turned up on Streetsblog, via Atlantic Cities, last week.

The yellow ones are subject to human error…

Both blogs linked to Tom Vanderbilt’s excellent Wired article on “The Autonomous Car of the Future” from a couple months back, which is probably worth a blog mention of its own (full disclosure, he’s on the Writing & Commentary jury for this year’s Core77 Design Awards). Vanderbilt provides an insightful, well-researched survey of the current state of (Possibility #2) the driverless automobile: nearly half of the article is dedicated to Google’s data-driven approach to ceding the wheel (to an algorithm no less), while the account of Mercedes’ efforts in developing ‘assistive’ driving technology serves a sort of counterpoint.

Of course, insofar as these two projects ultimately overlap quite a bit, Vanderbilt’s point is that the main challenges lie not in the technology itself but in public acceptance (including the legal implications) of so-called driverless cars:

This brings up the most challenging obstacle on our road to the autonomous-driving future: managing the handoff. For as long as anyone, even Google, is willing to predict, cars will by necessity be semi-autonomous; human drivers will still have to play some role. But figuring out what that role will be is complicated. Are we pilots or copilots? How far out of the loop can we be taken? “We need clear mental models of when you are better at something and when the car is better,” Stanford’s Nass says.

Thegreatergood.cc for Wired

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So new, the rats haven’t even moved in yet

Urban landscape photographer Jake Dobson had a cool assignment: To snap pictures while walking from Manhattan’s 34th Street and 11th Avenue to 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. The kicker was that he got to make the journey ten stories underground, in NYC’s newest, still-under-construction subway tunnel.

Under contract for Gothamist, the Brooklyn-based shooter documented Manhattan’s 7 Train Extension project, capturing the circular tunnel lined with curved, prefabricated concrete slabs and the vaulted new station expected to accommodate 35,000 people each hour.

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We mentioned British folding bike manufacturer Brompton in yesterday’s Tools & Kits entry, but as we haven’t given them much ink since 2005, it’s time for a little love.

Brompton’s a company admirably sticking to their roots by continuing to design/manufacture in their birthplace of West London. While that can’t be cheap, the company points out that “Moving production offshore in search of lower labour costs, business rates and taxes would certainly bring some obvious benefits, but these would be outweighed by the consequences of losing control over quality and, ultimately, losing the confidence of the consumer.” Hear hear.

They’ve put together an inside-the-factory video, so you can see where the magic happens.

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