In the year 3000, assuming humans are still around, designer Manuel Rossel thinks we’ll still be riding bikes–and that they’ll be a dominant form of urban transportation. Now he wants to figure out what that means for the apartments of the future.
In a new Indiegogo campaign, the Chile-based designer plans to work with cyclists and designers around the world to imagine the bike-inspired living spaces of the next millennium. By thinking so far ahead, he thinks it will be possible to come up with truly new ideas.
“It’s a matter of perception–if it were fewer years, it’s not long enough to imagine something completely different than we have today,” he says. “But it’s not an excessively distant future. It’s enough time for a whole civilization to process a comprehensive change in their system of thought.”
Rossel plans to take the new framework and use it to create the next line of his own work; for the last three years, he’s been designing furniture that doubles as bike storage, from bookshelves to sofas.
“Our contribution is to think about how to improve the experience of storing a bike using design, emphasizing that the bicycle is no longer something that one should hide,” he says. “It is a worthy object to expose for its aesthetic and philosophical value.”
The Indiegogo campaign launched today, and Rossel is looking for design input from anyone who rides a bike.
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