Since 2009, Italian designer Gianluca Gimini has been asking his friends, family and strangers to draw him pictures of bicycles from memory. He soon realised that most people have a hard time remembering exactly what a standard bike looks like, or even how they actually work.
“Some did get close, some actually nailed it perfectly, but most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle,” he writes on his website. “Little I knew this is actually a test that psychologists use to demonstrate how our brain sometimes tricks us into thinking we know something even though we don’t.”
He collected hundreds of drawings, and this year digitally rendered his favourites to see what they’d look like if they were built.
Here are some of the results:
See the rest of the collection here.
And here’s how he rendered them:
