MODA’s ‘Bike To The Future’ Features The Latest Innovations In Bicycle Design Around The Globe
The Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) has a new exhibition called “Bike To The Future,” exploring how bicycle design affects transportation infrastructure and the way we interact with our cities.
Courtesy of: MODA
In a world transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, our relationships with bicycles have also gone through transformation. The Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) has a new exhibition called “Bike To The Future,” exploring how bicycle design affects transportation infrastructure and the way we interact with our cities. “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes spoke with Laura Flusche, executive director of MODA, about the new exhibit and the museum’s other recent projects.
Interview highlights:
On creative leaps in bicycle design:
“The exhibition showcases some bikes that are meant to help us shift from car-centered cultures… In some cities, it’s easier to get around by bike rather than car, but we need to carry stuff. So we need cargo bikes, we need solutions for carrying our groceries or our kids,” said Flusche. “Something that’s really taken off in 2020: electric bicycles, that let us go farther and move faster, and manage hills in a city like Atlanta.”
“[The exhibit] looks at bikes that are made with interesting materials or technologies, like 3D printing, or, there’s one bike that’s entirely recycled from espresso capsules, if you can believe it. And there’s a bamboo tandem bike,” Flusche said.
Featured architect and artist Daan Roosegaard’s Van Gogh Bicycle Path:
The city [of Eindhoven, Netherlands] appears as a backdrop in [Van Gogh’s] painting, so what Daan Roosegaard did was to create a bike path … that uses the background from Van Gogh’s well-known painting ‘Starry Night’ as a pattern. He embedded the bike path with stones that absorb sunlight during the day, and then are luminescent and glowing at night,” said Flusche. “It’s really beautiful.”
Roosegaarde will be hosting a discussion called, “Climate & Change: Landscapes of the Future” on March 20 at 12 p.m.
The power of design to create a better world:
“It goes back to the idea of design as an agent of change, and designers as people whose charge in life is to help us navigate the now, and be ready for the future. Designers are uniquely poised to help us take on those big issues – and making a just and equitable world is one of the biggest,” said Flusche. “We have also used design in the past to design inequities into our world. And so using the same tool to remove those inequities is important as well, and to understand the difference and how we can do better.”
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