Cycling success is down to the perfect combination of rider and machine
-- and now the very bike that the British team has been riding in this
year's Tour of Britain is available to researchers online.
Team Sky's carbon fibre Pinarello road bike
<http://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=131182> has joined nearly 9000 plastic
objects at the Museum of Design in Plastics (MoDiP) at Arts University
College at Bournemouth. It has also been digitised as part of a
JISC-funded project which has made over 1500 objects from the collection
available online.
Louise Dennis, assistant curator at the museum, explained why the bike
design is of interest to researchers: "The material something is made of
has a great effect on its speed and plastics have been used by
manufacturers to overcome many of these issues. Carbon fibre is a
plastics-based composite material which allows the bike to be extremely
low in weight and yet be stiff, strong and responsive. In addition the
geometry of the tubing and the smoothness of the material help to reduce
drag."
Ben Showers, programme manager at JISC, said: "The ubiquitous nature of
plastic objects means that it is easy to take their impact for granted
-- but the newly digitised collection at the museum includes some
wonderful artefacts and objects that will help inspire students,
teachers and entrepreneurs contributing to our productive and innovative
creative economy.
"We now really want other academic and cultural institutions to learn
the lessons from this valuable project, which is a great example of how
a small scale digitisation project can become fully embedded and useful
to teaching and learning in an individual college as well as being
sustainable in the longer term," he added.
The plastic objects now have a dedicated section on the Visual Arts Data
Service (VADS) website <http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/MODIP> which
shares the collection with a wider audience and places it alongside
other archives from other art institutions such as Central St Martins,
London College of Communication, and the Design Council Slide Collection.
View the new online collection at: http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/MODIP
|