Re-use, obsolescence and shit design.
A few days ago I went on a bit of a rant on Instagram. It was prompted by a carbon fibre frame that was dropped off with me to see if I could repair it. It was a few years old, maybe 5 years, something like that, and it had a seatpost with an odd clamp. The sort of clamp that seems to have made it’s way onto a few other carbon fibre frames. This was a Canyon but I’ve seen the same, or more accurately (and pertinently) similar, clamps on other bikes. It was a sort of clamp/wedge design that sits inside the frame, and it had cracked. The original owner had contacted Canyon to be told that they no longer ‘support’ that particular model he had, and they had no stock of the spare part he needed. When prodded, they had no suggestions for him; his bike was 5 years old and was effectively broken beyond repair. His options were to try and find someone who had a clamp he could buy, maybe from a broken frame somewhere, find a machinist who could make the part he needed, or discard the frame and get a new one. All for a simple part that holds the saddle up.
The thing is, we’ve needed clamps to hold seatposts in position for about 100 years and there’s a perfectly good solution. Admittedly, not every frame is the same size and so we need a few different diameters, but I think that up until the proliferation of carbon frames, I’d be confident that about 99% of all frames used a seatclamp that was one of three sizes (28.6mm, 31.8mm or 34.9mm). Note this is the size of the frame tube that holds the seatpost, not the size of the seatpost itself. A lot of carbon (and some aluminium) frames don’t have a round portion of a seattube on the frame that one of these clamps fit to, so they need to find an alternative. And that’s where I think the whole thing deteriorates. A designer sitting in an office working on these bikes has failed to address the issue of sustainability. How long will this bike last, and how can we make sure its useful life is as long as possible? That bike could absolutely have been designed to work with a standard seatclamp but the designer decided to roll their own solution. And this wasn’t a solution that they then advocated as an improvement and could be made available on all bikes in the future. No, this was a closed, proprietary design that would work on this frame and nothing else.
Seatclamp that’s worked for about 100 years on the right, stupid fucking design on the right.
Just a quick point here, I’m not against new design, new products or innovative solutions to solve a problem or move the landscape along as our requirements change or as new materials become available. Right now, there are 33 parts listed as seatclamp spares on the the Canyon website and none of these parts will work for the guy I mentioned at the start of this article. Is this good design? I don’t think so. I think it’s short sighted and lazy.
Selling bikes is hard, the market is hugely saturated and every brand is scraping around on the design room floor looking for some USPs that can push their bike to the top of the customer’s wish list. In retail, we used to call this ‘swing tag bullets’. As a customer, you’d go into your local bike shop and be faced by rows and rows of bikes and every bike had a swing tag dangling from the bars. These swing tags gave you a nice bulleted list of why you should buy that particular bike; “18 gears!”, “Quad Butted Tubing”, “Modern Geometry for Comfort and Control”. Mostly marketing bullshit but they had to try and make their product stand out. And I think this is the problem with a lot of modern bike design, the customer, and their riding experience is sliding down the list of priorities when designing a bike or frame and is being replaced with ‘features’, something that in past would find its way onto a swing tag and now is an H2 on a website. For example, this piece of gold : “Check out our highly-praised Canyon engineered seatposts and clamps, designed to maximize the performance and comfort of your bike.” Really? Come on, it’s a seatclamp, it doesn’t maximise the performance or comfort. It’s just made up crap, to label shitty design to make the customer think their experience will be better if they choose a bike with that kind of seatclamp.
I’m picking on seat clamps here specifically, but every bike has a few parts that either the rider will have to interact with, or is a crucial moving component that may wear out, or makes up the fit or comfort of the bike and can be changed. Saddles, bearings, chains, grips, pedals etc. These are all adjustable or moving parts and will probably, over the life of the bike need to be replaced or changed at some point. Either because they’ve broken, worn out or need to be replaced to make the bike work for an individual. So as a designer, it’s crucial that you make sure the life of the bike isn’t going to be cut short because you’ve designed proprietary parts that wear out, or break and can’t be replaced.
I get riled up by this sort of thing because the impact of the way we design and manufacture things is long-reaching. There’s the obvious side of my example which is that someone’s bought a bike for a lot of money that’s now no use to them, that makes the bike a very, very expensive purchase. Then there’s the waste of resources, in the initial manufacturing of the bike and the transportation of that bike from Asia to the UK. The environmental and financial cost of that is not insignificant. All so someone can ride that bike for 5 or 6 years. And now what happens to the bike? In this case, the frame is carbon fibre, and right now, I know of no consumer-level way of recycling things like carbon bicycle frames or parts. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I just don’t know of an accessible way of doing it. While I think that the ability to recycle the raw material is important when choosing what we’re going to manufacture things from, being able to reuse the product beyond the original owner’s use is a way more efficient way of reducing the environmental impact that producing a product has. The longer the life the product has, the better for all of us. Even better is not to buy anything new in the first place, but that’s a more complicated (as well as philosophical) point. And this is why intelligent design with recycling, reusing or re-manufacturing in mind is really, really important.
Used bicycles at the Bike Station in Glasgow
There are loads of organisations/groups/charities that will take older and unwanted bikes, give them a service, a clean, a tune-up and sell them on. This is the best form of recycling. Not grinding or melting everything down, but reusing them for their original purpose. It’s friendly to the environment and financially sensible too. But this only works if you can get parts to fit the bikes. You need to be able to replace the components that wear out or have been damaged. I hear from friends and colleagues who work on older bikes for reuse that getting hold of parts and trying to get bikes back on the road is getting harder and harder. It’s a bit of a standing joke in the bicycle industry that the ever-growing list of standards in the bicycle industry is getting out of control. We have multiple headset standards, multiple bottom bracket standards, multiple axle standards and multiple brake fitting standards. Then you have compatibility issues with the different number of gears on bikes that have changed over the years. That can be frustrating, but mostly they are ‘standards’. The specification is published somewhere and many different vendors can, and do, make parts fitting into these standards. It‘s not ideal when you have competing standards, but things do change as materials and manufacturing techniques improve, and as I said, I’m not against improvement and advancement. But when these existing standards get ignored and proprietary designs make it onto bikes where there’s a perfectly good existing standard, then that just becomes shitty design. It’s short-sighted and it’s irresponsible. If you’re making a consumer product that costs thousands of pounds and you can’t service, repair or support that product for many years after you’ve sold it, then that’s irresponsible. I want to see bikes like that Canyon with a broken seatclamp make it onto the shop floor of a second-hand bike shop.
I think the reason this stuff winds me up so much is that if you’re a rider that just wants a nice bike and you’re not into all the tech details, you’ll have no idea if the bike you’re interested in will have been designed with re-use or recycling in mind. I suppose my final point in this mini-rant is that bike companies need to do much better. It’s not enough to chase customers with ill-thought out design ‘ideas’. Bike companies should not only quit adding useless, badly designed proprietary features but they need to be telling people about the design elements they’re using to make sure their bike doesn’t end up as landfill in 5 years time.
Peace out.