You can't ride a bike in Seattle without thinking about the seven hills. (No one can agree on which ones make up "the seven," but they're not a friendly ride.) And you better think about the city's famously unpredictable weather patterns. And who knows? You might finish work and want to head straight to the trails or the beach. These are the things that make Seattle unique. They're also a complicated combination if you're trying to build a bike.
So says Roger Jackson, a creative director at Teague, a storied design firm in Seattle that's known for designing the original Xbox and building interiors for Boeing. "We have a ton of hills, steep hills. We obviously have rain as well, so those hills can get slippy in the wet. So we were trying to have a bike for all occasions: something that you were comfortable riding downtown, but if you wanted to hit the trail, if you wanted to head out to one of the farmers markets, you didn't have to think about your bike or plan the day around the bike as you set out. We wanted you to just be able to take the bike and then go with how the city kind of moves on that day."
Teague was enlisted to design a new kind of bike by Oregon Manifest, a non-profit dedicated to making the world think differently about bikes. Its Bike Design Project gave firms in five cities the opportunity to build a bike made with their city in mind; the public then voted on the winner, which will enter a limited production run from Fuji Bikes. The New York City bike had a USB phone charger built in; The Evo, from San Francisco, was all about modular storage. Chicago's Blackline bike was a rugged pothole-conquerer of a bike, and Portland's PDX came with an app to personalize the ride just for you. For every different city, a different bike.
Every bike was made specifically for its city
But the voters picked Seattle. They picked Denny, the bike Jackson and the team at Teague designed with Sizemore Bicycles, a custom-bike maker in the city. (The bike is named for one of the founding families of Seattle, and for one of those dastardly hills.) The collaboration produced a bike that's designed to be both simple and powerful, to work in any situation at any time without its rider ever needing to worry about having the right tools at hand. "I think as we moved through it," Jackson tells me, "one of the things that we didn't want was having [to add] accessories to the bike." Everything about Denny was made with the same idea in mind: you just go.
That ethos led the Teague and Sizemore immediately to their most ingenious innovation: the lock. The lock is the handlebar and the handlebar is the lock. "You kind of see people get the tiny U-lock and they're shoving it in their back pocket," Jackson says. "Or they're hanging it on the handlebars, and it's swinging around and clamoring and it doesn't make for a comfortable riding experience." The team thought about putting a chain lock inside the frame, but decided that was less secure and more complicated. Plus, they found an added benefit to their solution: "when you come up to the bike, there's no handlebar. If I steal this bike, how do I ride it?"
Denny is not for what Jackson calls "road warriors," the folks with touring bikes and spandex. It's for the new class of casual rider. A bike-sharing system is coming, Seattle's bike lanes are more accessible — the city is working hard to turn commuters into riders. "We were trying to cater to people who were non-traditional riders," he says. So the team asked: "How do we lower maintenance? How do we integrate as much of it on to the frame so that they don't have to think about, ‘Do I need storage today? Do I need a lock today? Is it going to rain? Is it not going to rain?'" The bike doesn't scream "new!" or "technology!" It's just a bike — and that's on purpose.
You can't change but so much before a bike becomes something else
Of course, Denny does include a couple of practical necessities for the biking commuter: a fender to keep the bike from kicking dirt and rain on to your work clothes, and a platform on the front that straps down up to 50 pounds of cargo. "We just felt that we wanted a single storage solution that was flexible," Jackson says, "rather than putting the burden on people to kind of plan their day a little bit — Do I need to take the kit carrier? Do I need to carry bags on the rear? Things like that."
Everything decision, big and small, was about making bike riding as simple and thoughtless as driving a car. (I mean, the bike even has turn signals.) Denny automatically shifts gears for you, and there's even an electronic assist for when you're battling the seven hills. "You don't have to think about gears. They're like go-karts, you just go," Jackson says. "It wasn't even really a choice for us." Oregon Manifest's three pillars for the competition were safety, security, and convenience, and Teague and Sizemore decided convenience mattered most. "There's hills in Seattle that are rough, and if we're going to cater to the mainstream and try to get people to rethink their mode of transport for their commute, we have to do that."
After its victory in the Bike Design Project, Teague and Sizemore are working with Fuji Bikes to produce a limited run of Denny bikes starting in 2015. (The original brief was for 100 to be made, but Jackson says he's heard the number 1,000 thrown around as well.) The firms are meeting this week to talk design tweaks and manufacturing options, and to set things like prices.
The goal was to make people re-think what a bike doesBut the whole goal of the project, Jackson says, wasn't just to build a new bicycle; it was to make people rethink what a bicycle does. "I mean the bike has been fairly unchanged for over 100 years… I think we tried to make a bike that didn't scream e-assist, but you just felt the convenience and the benefits of that. And I think if we've got people to rethink their mode of transport, we'll have succeeded in what we set out to achieve."
"I think with the e-assist and the automatic gear shifting, we just feel good that we at least posed some questions to the community in ‘What is the role of the bike?’" If the response to the Bike Design Project is any indication, Teague might be onto something.
Chaim Gartenberg contributed to this report.
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