Designer digitally renders bicycles drawn from memory

Draw a bicycle. Without looking.

It’s much harder than you’d think, and one designer has rendered just some of the contraptions people came up with when asked to draw a bike from memory, with interesting results.

Bologna-based Gianluca Gimini asked family, friends and strangers to draw a men’s bicycle by heart, with varying success. As Design Boom points out, this technique is used by psychologists as an example of where we think we know something but its reproduction varies wildly from the object’s reality.

Gimini then took some of the hundreds of results and rendered some lifelike digital mockups of the machines in a collection he calls ‘Velocipedia’.

Video: how do bikes stay up?

“There is an incredible diversity of new typologies emerging from these crowd-sourced and technically error-driven drawings," he says.

"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.”

According to Gimini 90% of the bikes with front wheel drive were drawn by women, where men tended to overcomplicate the frame once they realised they had gone wrong.

Of course most of these bicycles would never survive in the wild (i.e. you couldn't ride them, or they'd feel weird to ride, or break) – not least the one with front wheel drive – but they are pleasing-slash-amusing to look at.

You can see some of the strange and beautiful machines here. How did yours turn out?