Mark Sanders is the designer of the popular strida bikes. Recently, he has presented a keynote address at the Taipei Bike show. Here is his presentation with notes of his speech.

I like his comment on Universal design, it applies to all sorts of products including software User interfaces to bikes, cars, toilets and what not. There are tons of examples of good design and tons or extremely bad ones. I like Apple computers for the simple reason that they employ consistent design principles though out their product lines. Think of Google and their simple, accessible home page. Now look at yahoo and live search, ugh.

Like mentioned in the presentation, it should be simple, universal design but the engineering may be complex. The end user need not worry about the engineering. Now that’s what will get people to use the products.

Getting people to adopt cycling has to be addressed in various stages, bicycle design, marketing, infrastructure development and education. The presentation addresses the designers and manufacturers. But for people to focus on the 80% of the untapped blue ocean market, thy need to be assures there will be return in investment. This assurance can be provided by town planners focusing on infrastructure and Traffic planners focusing on multi modal commute. Bike marketing should start focusing on utility biking rather than imagery sports cyclists.

The bicycle uptake cannot increase if there is effort put in on area alone and it is high time everyone stepped up the game in promoting biking.