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competitiveness. Starting from a ‘clean sheet of paper’, Pashley have achieved exceptional results (25 frames per welder per day for the latest workbike designs). At Moulton, the focus is on engineering and technology – the development and refinement of suspension systems to improve ride comfort and efficiency, the continuing drive to increase frame stiffness whilst reducing weight – and the rather qualitative and subjective aim of producing a bicycle that is ‘a great pleasure to own and use’.


Whatever the design direction, there must be an emphasis on quality in engineering and design, for embedding quality at an early stage will pay for itself many times over. We must stay focused on the product and the end-user. We must understand the purpose of the object we are designing, and measure product performance in a realistic and emotive way. Recent years have seen a focus on quantifying everything possible, often with damaging results – witness the plethora of digital cameras sold on high pixel counts


alone, yet image quality suffers due to pixel density. The user wants to take great pictures, and ten mega-pixels are often better than sixteen. These cheap cameras, and indeed mobile phones, music players etc, are now almost disposable items – unsatisfactory in use and likely to succumb to terminal failure, certain to be replaced by something shinier, newer and equally useless, after only a few months.


There is no doubt that, given the current economic and environmental climate, there are challenges ahead. Engineering design is well-positioned to answer many of these challenges, but we must get real. For the benefit of society, we must all look to inspire, support and achieve. To return to Papanek: “Design must become an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the true needs of men. It must be more research-orientated, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.” I concur. Let’s get on with it.


About the Author Dan Farrell is technical director at Pashley Cycles, bicycle manufacturers in England since 1926. He also works as a design engineer at Moulton Bicycles, and acts as a consultant to others. He is an accomplished cyclist, and is known for his technical and travel writing. He was elected a Fellow of the IED in 2011.


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