The Brief
Design a sculpturally beautiful and functional exercycle to help users focus and experience fitness.
Shard is an exercise concept bicycle designed by Analogy for the International Bicycle Design Competition in 2017 and subsequently won an award at the event in Taipei. The overall objective of the project was to design an exercise bike that was sculpturally beautiful with extremely different materials put together to look and feel exquisite and exclusive but at the same time be functional and perform well.
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CLIENT
Inhouse Experimental
SERVICES
Focussed Market Research
Design Language
Concept Generation
Design Engineering
Product Architecture
Visualization
Prototyping
Production Support
Awards
IBDC 2017-18
Industart 2018
YEAR
2017
The Problem
Most exercise bikes are treated horribly as they are just functional and have no other visual attention. Most of them live in closets and basements never to see the light of the day. Also, most of these bikes are mechanical in nature and don't really provide the concentrated workout for a consumer at home. With various distractions at home, the performance and efficiency of your workout are highly limited.
Introducing
A New Home Fitness Experience
Home fitness has always been a singular experience and also fraught with multiple distractions, some of the most important aspects we were trying to achieve with this concept were:
Doesn't Suit Home Interiors
Motivation
No Training to guide
Competition
Engagement
Used Initially but easily forgotten
Understanding the problem context
Workouts at home are full of distractions, whether its kids, the TV, music or just plain indecisiveness about what to do next. Secondly the usual exercycle is an ugly, closet living object that has not been reimagined for more than 2 decades. A user who has a routine has an added task of storing away the ugly object inside a closet or in the basement.
Sensory
Non Interfering
Seamless
Natural
Mood Enhancing
Control Modalities
The Thought Process
Defining Fitness and the User Experience
We believe through a lot of research that Training with light is really good to focus on your workouts. Ambient light and custom mood lighting modes for bikes in a stationary mode, scientists and researchers believe could be reactionary to the environment, like reacting to volume or the frequency of the music.
The Thought Process
Fitness by Activity
Understanding how and when peak performance can be affected by color and light intensity was important. Shard uses light to inform the user on responses to help keep them in focus as well as alert them with notifications to change the routine. We had to understand what performance and cool down meant in a traditional environment before defining it at home.
The Thought Process
Fitness by Activity
Comparing cycling and home fitness with regular sports to understand activity levels.
Process
Idea Generation
As part of our discovery process and mapping ideas, we looked at a variety of inspirational images and existing products to understand where we could add value and what was the focus of the problems we were trying to solve. A large part of this exercise is driven towards pushing the limit on how much outside the box we can think.
Process
Ergonomics and Scale
Once we had a final idea picked we were able to conceive it out and then created a tape drawing to understand the full scale and the ergonomic and human factors to fit a variety of people ranging in different heights and body measurements.
UI Design
Defining the Interface and UI elements that make up the digital app
Concept Development
An Exercise Bike you will be proud to display in your Living Room
UI Design
All in one platform to train, Race and Sync various stats to your bike and workouts.
Features
Race Mode
Race mode brings a competitive edge to fitness workouts and we built this through concentrated user research. Most of the suggestions included some sort of competitive workout with friends and also with stats and records against previous profiles etc to make sure that they could also be considered the best. We designed Race mode in the app as well as the light simulation on the object itself turns to give that focussed attention.
Features
Training Modes
While looking for training features in our UX phase, our focus was to understand the way people train. One of the key insights was to look at interval training and Time & Distance as key elements.
Features
Custom Challenges to keep you motivated
Features
Sync multiple parameters
With the app, you can sync various aspects of your fitness routine, music, Maps, VR as well as the lightning that accompanies your routine. Each aspect of this can be customized or with multiple modes, you can choose from the curated menu of options.
