Bike with board a new design challenge for BMW man

When former BMW motorbike designer Oliver Neuland moved from Germany to New Zealand just over a year ago, his newly adopted lifestyle spawned a unique challenge.

The design consultant and senior Industrial and Transport Design lecturer at Massey University’s Auckland School of Design had never been able to pursue his two passions, motorcycle riding and surfing, so readily until he moved here.

Being able to strap a surfboard to his beloved Triumph 900cc bike and roar off to Auckland’s west coast waves would be ideal. Daunting logistics aside, he reckons attaching the board to a trailer hooked up to the bike could be the answer. He’d like to figure it out on paper sometime, but it is by no means the most pressing transport issue on his mind.

In his capacity as a transport design lecturer, he encourages students to create environmentally-friendly, sustainable energy-fuelled vehicles and transport systems. The challenge for designers, he says, is to incorporate energy efficient methods – such as fuel cells, bio-fuel, electric engines or hybrid systems – whilst creating an aesthetically pleasing vehicle.

What designers have to bear in mind, however, is that car buyers still want their vehicle to conform to certain aesthetic standards, no matter how clean and green their inner workings.

And with motorcycles, “the separation between body and inner technology is not so clear. For motorcyclists – who are even more emotionally attached to their machine – the mechanics are a core part of the beauty of their vehicle,” says Mr Neuland.
“So changing to an eco-friendly technology is a much bigger design challenge because the ‘heart’ of an electric engine beats differently and proportions change dramatically,”  he says.

In this light, designers need not only a sound knowledge and appreciation of the technical engineering realities, but a sense whether there is a market for their new, innovative design.

Alternatively, they sometimes find that what might seem a silly and impractical notion may in fact turn out to become a viable product that meets a demand in the market.
This might just be the case for his conceptual motorbike-pulled surfboard trailer, he says.

As well as two years working for BMW’s department of motorcycle design in Munich from 1996-97, he has designed Mastiff and Baghira models for famous German motorcycle producer MZ motorcycles, and clay models for BSA Bantam bike designs as well as first class aircraft seats for Cathay Pacific for Seymour Powell in London.

Before moving to New Zealand, he’d spent the past 10 years running his own design company in Berlin, along with guest lecturing at design schools throughout Germany.
In 2004 he organised one of the biggest-ever international motorcycle design competitions in Munich, attracting 150 entries and backing from BMW, Yamaha, Honda and Kawasaki.

So it is no surprise that Mr Neuland remains a keen advocate for the motorcycle. Even those made in a less eco-friendly era are more fuel efficient, take up less space and are much more readily recyclable than a car, he argues.

And while he’s not exhorting Aucklanders to trade in their four wheel-drives for Harley Davidsons to resolve the city’s growing traffic congestion, his vision for “an efficient public transport system requiring a limited change of infrastructure” is something he’d like have a hand in creating.

Any design initiative – from modest to mammoth - starts at the drawing board. As a specialist in classic hand-rendered design techniques, Mr Neuland has recently launched an instructive DVD giving step-by-step tutoring pencil sketched design to illustrate dimensions, perspective and details.
 
“There are a lot of good books, but on a DVD you can see the whole process,” he says.

Although the growing trend towards replacing manual sketching and modelling with digital methods may appear to save time and money, “one never gets an idea of the real proportions and how the details work with it,” he says.

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Created: 04/03/2008 | Last updated: 03/03/2008

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