I remember there was a time when Nigeria (in 2009) passed a law that all commercial motorcyclists and passengers on bikes must wear helmets.
It was a major issue for the passengers of commercial bike riders in Nigeria (okadas) as they didn’t want contract any hair infectious diseases. And the commercial motorcyclists felt the helmets were too expensive. Some of them resorted to painted calabashes as helmets due to their low costs compared to the prices of real helmets. Nigerians came up with different versions of helmets and they still do in some areas to this day.
Now there is an alternative. It is EcoHelmet. EcoHelmet is a foldable, vendable, recyclable helmet designed for bike shares.
The helmet, designed by Isis Shiffer, has won the James Dyson Award for 2016. The contest awarded Shiffer $45,000, and provided an additional $7,500 to the university department where she studied design and engineering.
She was inspired to design EcoHelmet when she was travelling abroad and she wanted to use share bikes. She said she was uncomfortable riding without a helmet and she did not have an inexpensive option available.
The EcoHelmet is made entirely of cardboard and is compact enough to fit in a laptop bag when folded. It cushions the wearer’s head with honeycomb-patterned paper that absorbs and distributes impacts, protecting cyclists from injury.
The simplicity of EcoHelmet’s construction, coupled with its inexpensive materials, will keep the manufacturing costs low – meaning they can be sold for $5 at bike share stations.
Sir James Dyson, inventor and founder of the award, praised the EcoHelmet for presenting a simple and “elegant” solution to the problem of providing cheap, accessible helmets to users of urban bike-share programs. He also said he looked forward to seeing EcoHelmets used in bike shares across the world
The James Dyson Award is an international design award that celebrates, encourages and inspires the next generation of design engineers. The Award is open to current and recent design engineering students. It’s run by the James Dyson Foundation, James Dyson’s charitable trust, as part of its mission to get young people excited about design engineering.
