Reinventing The Bike Rack With Flexible Rubber

Who says you have to lock a bike to metal? The Loop is a new rack that won't scratch up your nice new ride--and it looks pretty cool, too.

There are dozens of designs for bike racks, from David Byrne’s typography-inspired shapesin Brooklyn to old parking meters that have been chopped off and converted for cyclists. But they all tend to have one thing in common: They’re almost always made in steel. Designers from The Federal, a design consultancy in Ottawa, Canada, decided to try something different with the Loop, a flexible rack made from rubber.

Rather than starting with the problem of redesigning bike racks, the designers started by looking at a material they had--a new type of rubber--and wondering what they could do with it. “Once we have a new material in hand, we start exploring new applications,” says Ian Murchison, co-founder of The Federal. “We look at industries that are typically dominated by one type of material, one single function.”

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