This Yamaha is a festival of useless cosmetic flourishes. Its drooping lines and pudgy bulges are just silly. Its ancillary components are remarkably overweight. The design team been must have told We don’t care, it just can’t look like last year’s model. I really didn’t want to start a new project, but I just couldn’t resist. Like picking at a strip of peeling wallpaper.
At first I just tried not looking at it, but eventually I started pulling parts from it in order to make it less, silly, I guess. Soon, it was in bits, and I have a project started.
You’d think I’d be working on a plan, shaping a concept of what I thought this should become, and drawing up a list of technical considerations.
Oddly, I’m preoccupied with understanding how a motorcycle that so completely misses the point even came to exist.
Long ago, I felt that motorcycles embodied the ideal of Function dictating Form. In my world, then, that was important. Years pass, and I cross paths this machine that scoffs at that ideal. It has sold out to fashion and sales goals. It’s not stylish, not efficient, not nimble, fast, rugged, or innovative, not anything in particular. Just a bland consumer product.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but at least I don’t have to look at it anymore.