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What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

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Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#61

Post by stefan_ »

ianbicking wrote: post #26

I'm looking at the third one down and wondering: why aren't all-wheel-drive bikes a thing? (Well, steering...) I guess there is such a thing: http://christinibicycles.com/ – sounds pretty complicated: 'A handlebar-mounted switch controls the AWD “shift on the fly” clutch. When the clutch is engaged, the rear spiral gear interlocks with the rear hub and power is transferred via internal shafts to the forward spiral ge…

Crucially a front wheel losing traction isn't recoverable. So it has rained, you ride over a bunch of leaves and that is the moment the electric motor decides to apply power, you're going down immediately.

And why in the first place, there is no benefit.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#62

Post by grkvlt »

userbinator wrote: post #9

It would be interesting to split the respondents into two groups, one who rides bikes regularly and one who doesn't, and compare the results. The "2WD" ones are particularly perplexing. On the other hand, I bet if you asked people to draw a car, 99% of them would draw something realistic --- it's the arrangement of the frame tubes on a bike that most people just haven't looked at in detail or remembered.

This is exactly what was done in the paper[0] the drawings came from. And, actually, it was the chain of the bike, not the frame, that had most errors. The results are also broken down by gender, and are interesting. For male non-cyclists the error rate was about half that of female non-cyclists. For cyclists, the males had almost zero errors but female error rates were pretty much unchanged (the chain position errors dropped, but were still higher than male non-cyclists).

This (probably?) says a lot about the way men and women think...

0. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~rlawson/cycleweb.html

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#63

Post by jdietrich »

21 wrote: post #40
jdietrich wrote: post #7

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They'v…

> A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form I disagree, compared with most objects a human daily interacts with - doors, furniture, lifts, cars - a bicycle is one of the most complex visible forms. I'm talking about what can be seen from outside, since obviously a car is much more complex on the inside. Most of the stuff we deal with is composed of square/boxes and circle/tubes. Triangular shapes are quite rare i…

Clench your fist. Take a moment to notice the complexity of the geometry. Consider how you might reduce that shape to simple geometric forms. Consider how you might represent the three-dimensional form as a set of two-dimensional lines. Turn your hand around and look at it from a different angle. Open your fist and make an "OK" or a "peace" sign.

Go to your refrigerator and take out a lettuce leaf or a piece of broccoli. Look out of your window at a tree or a bush. Go to your bathroom and look at the toilet or the faucet. Look in the mirror and make a funny face.

A bicycle is more complicated than many rectilinear man-made objects, but it's a relatively straightforward collection of lines. Even the drawings in the linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively speaking.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#65

Post by MrFantastic »

jdietrich wrote: post #7

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They'v…

If you understand how a bicycle works it's easy to draw. Most people don't care to understand things on a deeper level.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#66

Post by jdietrich »

Someone wrote: post #52
jdietrich wrote: post #7

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They'v…

”The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial” Trivial? Painting a single shape everybody knows got Giotto a job ( http://theorbitbrown.com/site/the-perfect-circle/ ) There are huge differences between humans in drawing ability and training. But yes, in the case of these drawings, it seems the main difference is that many people apparently have never looked at a bicycle frame. I expec…

The Giotto story is almost certainly a myth. It's also largely irrelevant; anyone can draw a perfect circle in two seconds with a pair of compasses or a piece of string.

There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years. Becoming a confident and capable draftsman is a skill that anyone can learn to a surprisingly high degree of proficiency in a remarkably small amount of time. Most of us won't become Albrecht Dürer, but we all have the innate capacity to draw well if we simply understand the process.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#67

Post by golem14 »

jdietrich wrote: post #7

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They'v…

As Sherlock Holmes would say to Dr. Watson: "You see, but you don't observe".

So I quite agree with you - but it feels surprising that so many people just don't do any validation of their model in their head. _How_ the author was asking to draw the bicycle probably mattered. E.g. "immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart" vs: "think about how a bicycle actually works and draw that".

BTW - In all honesty, it took me, too, a second to spot what was missing on the first picture.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#69

Post by dirtyaura »

atourgates wrote: post #42
duderific wrote: post #18

If you scroll down, the designer has produced images that match some of the ideas from the sketches. They are beautiful and mesmerizing. At first I thought he had actually built out the physical bicycles from the sketches, but it turns out they are just computer renderings. Nonetheless it shows the power of "mistake" driven design, to generate novel ideas.

As odd at is - this[1] design has a couple elements that have been reproduced in the real world. While the exact 2wd system shown in the rendering would have some real issues, 2wd mountain bike systems do exist. They can rely on impressively strange chain routing[2], a system of gears and internal shafts[3], or just an electric hub[4] (which is admittedly, not really the same thing). As far as the one-sided frame goe…

I didn’t know about 2WD bikes existed! I’d love to try out to experience how it feels to drive 2WD.

The Lefty design also looks very interesting, do you have practical experience with it?

What an amazing comment full of new eye-opening information for me, thanks

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