Shimano STEPS group for e-bikes

The Shimano Total Electric Power System, aka STEPS, is due to be launched at Eurobike in September. Bike Radar has a first look at the group, which includes a 250W electric motor and a 24V/4.0Ah lithium-ion battery that can be charged by regenerative braking. The 8-speed internally geared hub is operated by electronic shift buttons, and buttons...

African Bicycle Design Contest

Cycling out of Poverty is a non-profit foundation that raises money for projects that allow Africans to improve their daily lives through the use of bicycles. Currently, they are running an African Bicycle Design Contest at Wiki-Bike.com. On the website, you can read about the competition and you can upload your own ideas for durable and...

Bicycling Science book giveaway

Looking back at the reports for the Bicycle Design Amazon store, it is clear that the book Bicycling Science is the best seller of the items I have listed. I am glad to see that, because it is definitely the first book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the design and engineering of bicycles (followed by Archibald Sharpe’s 1896...

Book Review: Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism, by Christopher Salyers

Despite the erudite and thoughtful historical introduction and the literally hundreds of context-rich photos of machines in-situ, fate, of course, would have the Core77 team first open Christopher Salyers new book to the full-bleed photo of a Japanese "used" panty vending machine. Attacking that subject with the academic rigor it deserves...

Core77's iPhone 4 first impressions

Years ago I was employed as an urban dating columnist. (What can I say, it was the dot-com boom.) For one installment I took a NYC-based dating workshop called the RelationShop. Internet dating was just picking up at the time, and the workshop instructor/relationship guru gave us all this piece of advice for navigating dating websites: "Don't...

The Living Principles for Design: A new online community for sustainable design

Today marks the official launch of the Living Principles for Design, a new online portal "intended to give the creative community a place to share and showcase best practices, tools, stories and ideas for enabling sustainable action, popularizing the efforts of those who use design thinking to affect positive cultural change."Originally conceived...

Vac from the Sea: Electrolux's quest to collect the ocean's plastic debris and turn it into vacuums

Electrolux has just embarked on a quest: to collect the debris from plastic islands in the ocean and turn them into a line of 6 vacuum cleaners, each representing one of the following bodies of water: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and the North Sea. The quest intends to bring attention to...

Jurors have a hard time (in a good way) determining 2010 International Design Excellence Awards top prize

That there is the proverbial better mousetrap. The OneDown mousetrap's ingenious design is simple to "set," with no danger of snapping your fingers in anything; it clearly indicates when it's captured something (the weight of an entering mouse rolls it from horizontal to vertical); and there's no mess, as it doesn't kill the mouse, just traps...

This is how you do a pop-up community! ESPN's Match Truck delivers World Cup matches and world-class street food

At 7am this morning a yellow delivery truck trundled through Manhattan carrying, along with raw food ingredients, a rather unusual payload: The United States national soccer team. The Algerians too.Not the actual teams of course, but by 9am, when the specially-designed LCD television was rigged up atop the truck, the truck made good on its...