Dr. Sarah Gallacher Recently Led a Brainstorming Session Investigating User Experiences and Ideas for her Crowd-Sourcing Bicycle Project

Card, glue, scissors, lego and plasticine – the essential tools for a great brainstorming session!  Indeed these are the tools we used to get our creative juices flowing around the theme of cycling.

There is much bike related research work carried out across the world, from the Copenhagen wheel to the Fukoshima wheel and at ICRI-Cities we are also investigating this interesting area.  However, in contrast to previous works that focus on enhancing the physical bike, we would like to focus on the cyclist and enhancing the cycling experience.

At our brainstorming session we began by thinking of positive and negative cycling experiences and associating emotions to those events.  Then the fun began as we designed and developed novel and crazy objects that could allow cyclists to express their emotions while on the move.

The result was a variety of wonderful objects ranging from the very fun to the quite practical.  We had “bike gearsticks”, “lazer light indicators”, “sensing pedals”, “pop-up emoticons”, “squeezy destressers”, “emotional handlebars” and “tail mounted communication devices” to name a few.

Cycling has never been so much fun!