Cartcycle
with Mike Burke
November 2007
New York City
Arc-Welding + Transportation
sketches
video opening bike
video testing bike
Designed through close collaboration with homeless individuals the Cartcycle merges the utility of a
bicycle with that of a shopping cart. The relationship of the two objects places the rider behind the
cart creating a rear-propelled environment. The customary front bicycle wheel is removed so that the
bicycle fork can be lodged into the shopping cart.
The Cartcycle in no way is supposed to be viewed as a solution to the homeless epidemic. Its design is merely
a playful attempt to comment on the public space using an attention-getting artifice that is imbued with
divergent psychological associations. On one hand, the shopping cart is a symbol of capitalism, while on the
other hand it represents the merchants of the urban metropolis. In the confusion that arises the mere
spectacle of the cart, in and of itself, aims to dissolve any filter that the haves view the have-nots.
For the Cartcycle gives the street merchants a sense of identity separating them from their humbled place upon
the sidewalk. Quite literally it places them at eye-level, but psychologically it places their social worth
at a new plane.
Out of the Aisle and Into the Streets*article for Nohaus*
INTRODUCTION
Street merchants pushing their emblematic shopping cart now have the option to pedal. The
Cartcycle merges the utility of a bicycle with that of a shopping cart, fashioning a vehicle that is the envy
of recyclers and vagabond vendors. Designed through close collaboration with homeless individuals, Nohaus
offers a vehicle that is as iconic as it is individual. At street level, the success of the Cartcycle rests
on the fact that where others make light of the homeless epidemic, Nohaus has literally made heavy. It is in
the ruckus rousing of the Cartcycle's cacophony that we hope to elevate the have-nots while distracting the
haves.
PRODUCT
The Cartcycle is the fusion of a bicycle and a shopping cart. The relationship of the two objects
places the rider behind the cart creating a rear-propelled environment. The customary front bicycle wheel is
removed so that the bicycle fork can be lodged into the shopping cart. This arrangement does not affect the
mechanics of the bicycle, which are predominantly associated with the rear of the bike, i.e. the gears, chain,
and pedals. In effect, this arrangement causes an ease of balancing since there are now five wheels for
balancing instead of two, allowing the rider to place more emphasis on pedaling which grows exponentially more
difficult as the weight of their cargo increases.
Another feature of the Cartcycle is the enlarged storage capacity of the front compartment. Here, two
shopping cart baskets have been hinged together to create an enlarged, vacuous area. The hinge allows the top
to flip down, elongating the structure and providing protection for its user. Simultaneously, this expanded
formation doubles as a display area for selling merchandise.
Through hybridization of the two objects Nohaus hypothesize an increase in mobility, ease of transport, and
assistance in security. Originally designed for homeless individuals supporting a nomadic way of life, the
Cartcycle is more recently undergoing redesign for street vendors, pedicab drivers, demolition workers, and
mobile librarians. Through further customization of the Cartcycle, a better, more secure means of street
commerce exists.
PRECEDENTS
Inherent in the Cartcycle design are two inventions that revolutionized the way modern society functions: the
bicycle and the shopping cart. The bicycle is a 19th century French invention that presently number in the
billions worldwide. It quickly eased mobility by taking advantage of two other important inventions, the
paved road and the pneumatic tire. The ancient Roman Empire created the first roads and the pneumatic tire was
introduced much later in 1845 by Thompson. In 1885 Dunlop further developed the tire to decrease the rolling
resistance of carriage wheels to nearer that experienced by the railway wheel.
The shopping cart (originally known as a "buggy" or "trolley") was invented by an American named Sylvan N.
Goldman. During that time, customers usually carried bags or baskets while shopping. Goldman realized that
customers would shop longer and buy more if they didn't have to carry their groceries, lending him to build
the first shopping cart. He introduced his invention in Oklahoma City on June 4, 1937 at the Piggly Wiggly
grocery chain. It was not an instant hit and customers proved reluctant to start using the carts due to
gender issues. Men tended to feel it insulted their strength to carry multiple bags and younger woman felt it
hinted that they were mothers shopping for their family. This led Goldman to hire fake shoppers to walk
around using the carts, which lowered the barrier for stigmas associated to the device. Since then, Goldman's
invention has revolutionized the way that society makes purchases, the interior design of grocery stores,
where products are placed in the store, and the size of grocery stores themselves. Inevitably, Goldman moved
into the supermarket business and became an extremely wealthy before his death in 1984.
It is easy to understand the relevancy of this project when looking at my background. I am a 5th generation
Nevadan from the town of Reno. Most know Reno as the biggest little city in the world, but more experience
its lesser-known motto 'where dreams come to die.' At the epicenter of that malfunctioned dream is the
trailer park. Here the nomadic and economically challenged steer their mobile homes into tight-knit rows and
decorate with cinder blocks, stray cats, and astro-turf. In comparison the trailer is big brother to the
shopping cart. Both carry goods, are human-steered, and are mobile. However, their utilitarian uses have
been reinterpreted by individuals that choose to use them not as tools but as a way of life. No longer are
they used for such things as driving from point a to point b or collecting items at a grocery store. They are
used for collecting cans, raising kids, serving dinner, storing goods, and even as centers of commerce.
The shopping cart holds satire as much as it holds commercial goods. Ironically, its ability to facilitate
the spending of money has been adopted by a class of people who lack any money at all. In fact, the
reappropriation of shopping carts by the homeless is a common site in just about every city. And while the
mechanics and operation of the cart don't work nearly as smoothly on the sidewalk as they do on the aisle, you
wouldn't know by the surplus of shopping carts in use by the homeless.
PROCESS
My concept stemmed from the common stereotype that homeless people are lazy. I tend to feel this
myself since so many people have been marginalized by the economics of the city and are forced to pan handle
on the streets. Most of these individuals one sees in passing on their way to work, school, or wherever. I
began to think, 'how do I invert that perspective? How can I make the homeless people view us as if we are
stationary and they are the ones with somewhere to go?' Out of this idea I began piddling with shopping
carts. Since most individuals working and living on the street have shopping carts it seemed like an
appropriate direction. Being an avid bicyclist I also began toying with permutations of the two and ways they
could coalesce into something strangely foreign
Before I reached my test product I began investigating the history of similar projects, nomadic lifestyles,
and vagrancy. Naturally, Krzystof Wodiczko was the first person I found and began studying his Homeless
Vehicle. His homeless vehicle of 1988 overcompensated for the invisibility of the homeless by creating an
ostentatiously designed, militaristic looking mobile dwelling. It functioned both practically and
psychologically. Similar to Wodiczko's more well known projections, the Homeless Vehicle also plays with the
tenuousness of memory, where as Dick Hebdige states in Public Message, "...after one sees his work, a
supermarket cart, a homeless person, they will never seem quite the same again."
This afterimage allows for greater agency of the homeless in an analogous way to the photographic work of
Jacob Riis, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Brassai. These photographers illuminated "the other" in ways
unseen by those living directly beside them. And although society saw the lower class, the drunks, and the
vagrants of the street, they only mutable mingled with them in passing before returning back to their
sanitized life. The same can be said for the literary work of Upton Sinclair, William Booth, and Charles
Dickens who wrote and work extensively with the poor. All of the aforementioned artists helped to transpire
the evanescent nature of the transient to the indelible regions of the mind.
Much physical change and experimentation has been happening to the bicycle in Germany and many of the
Scandinavian countries. In Copenhagen, Christiania Bikes has created a similar Cartcycle used for the
transportation of goods, people, and entire families. Their tricycle can be found all throughout Copenhagen
and is widely used by commuters.
A less utilitarian application of bicycle experimentation can be send in Lui Tratter's technical studies
workshop at the Frankfurt School in Austria. Lui essentially turned his class into a cycle manufacturing
company soon elevating his social status from Professor to Bicycle Philosopher of Frankfurt. Nearby, Peter
Messerschmidct, a lecturer in Technology in W. Germany developed a coupling device he calls the Rollfiet that
links a wheelchair to a bicycle similar to that of the coupling device of boxcars.
At the heart of bicycling in and of itself is nomadicism. Nomads are divided up into three categories:
hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, and peripatetics. The Cartcycle represents the latter demographic which
dates back to 335 BC. The first Peripatetics were an unruly group of drunks who reportedly followed Aristotle
and his students while they were on their philosophizing walks at the Lyceum in Athens. It is uncertain if
the division of nomadism called Peripatetics was in fact named after the school of Philosophy that Aristotle
founded or this wandering group of vagabonds.
Currently, there is an influx of homeless individuals in America due to returning veterans from Iraq. If this
echoes the statistics from the Vietnam War the footprint will be astounding. Historically the cause of many
displaced individuals is due to returning war veterans. One of the most notable attempts to remove these
vagabonds was the Vagrancy Act of 1820 in London, which tried to clear the streets of veterans from the
Napoleonic war. At any rate it is easy to see the parallels between the Peripatetics of the past and the ones
of the present.
USER TESTS
My client is Phil, a middle-aged black man that has lived in New York City ever since he was five-years old.
We met on Broadway and Grand on a cold post-Thanksgiving day. Phil, along with about a dozen other people,
was selling second hand items out of his shopping cart when the cops showed up. The police's loudspeaker
sounded over the cacophony of consumers as Phil and the others began packing up their mobile stores. Before he
could leave I introduced myself as well as my project. Coincidentally, Phil stunned me by already knowing all
about the design. He reported seeing it locked up on 13th Street and staring at it in amazement for ten
minutes. The cops continued to escort the unlicensed shopping cart vendors from the sidewalk, Phil being one
of them.
Even though I had begun designing the Cartcycle for Paul (a.k.a. 'sleepy'), a homeless man whom mysteriously
went missing two weeks after our initial design meetings, it seemed evident that the cart's function was more
suited for a Renaissance man of mobile-commerce like Phil. So in less than 30 minutes I returned to Broadway
and Grand. The vendors were back; their shopping carts mesh frames balancing swollen black plastic bags of
future x-mas presents. In the chaos I could see Phil packing up to leave. The commotion of the cartcycle's
castor wheels caught his attention and he turned his hooded head. I gave him the cartcycle, the lock and
keys, and let him loose to navigate the streets that he grew up on. We scheduled our next meeting for one
week later and as he made his preliminary pedal he drifted a little wide and swiped a parked Lexus.
OUTLOOK
The utmost technical problem so far is rolling resistance; described in Bicycle Science as 'the resistance to
the steady motion of the wheel caused by power absorption in the contacting surfaces of wheel and road.' The
Cartcycle uses five wheels but due to a slightly askew hinge that is not perpendicular to the point of wheel
contact, when turning, the bike shifts to using only three wheels. Regardless of this lifting nuisance, the
bike is composed of one 28" bicycle wheel and four 3" rubber shopping cartwheels. The front wheels use castors
to rotate a full 360 degrees while the back two are in a fixed position. Research by Grandvoinet show that if
the diameter of a wheel was increased 35 percent, the rolling resistance decreased 20 percent. Additional
research of small-wheeled bicycles by Barger highlights the increase in rolling resistance by the decrease in
tire pressure.
The Cartcyle avoids issues of tire pressure resistance since it utilizes four solid rubber wheels. Since they
are not pneumatic they have less resistance and more importantly, they require less maintenance by their
operator. After all, the Cartcycle is not intended for high-speeds such as time trials, but for ease of
mobility by the nomadically inclined and economically deprived. The cart should be simplified as much as
possible to create an ease of development and dissemination.
The Cartcycle in no way is supposed to be viewed as a solution to the homeless epidemic. Its design is merely
a playful attempt to comment on the public space using an attention-getting artifice that is imbued with
divergent psychological associations. On one hand, the shopping cart is a symbol of capitalism, while on the
other hand it represents the merchants of the urban metropolis. And in the confusion that arises, the mere
spectacle of the cart in and of itself should dissolve the filter that the haves view the have-nots through.
For the Cartcycle gives the street merchants a sense of identity separating them from their lowly place upon
the sidewalk. Quite literally it places them at eye-level, but psychologically it places their social worth
at a new plane. In the future I would like to develop a coupling device that can be added to any shopping cart
and bicycle in order to make the two easily detachable. This design would alleviate difficulties to construct
a Cartcycle of ones own by people lacking proper tools. Early concepts are based on coupling devices of train
cars, human hands, the Rollfiet, and stacking relationships of folding chairs. Dissemination of this coupling
device through my test subject Phil would seem to be the most reasonable approach.
download the powerpoint
here
