Concept Bikes & Bike Innovation - for better or worse

I'm (now) an industrial designer by profession so I'll attempt to give a bit of an explanation behind designs like these.

Essentially these concept pieces don't 'work' in the traditional sense because they're not meant to - they're made to advertise the creator's sense of aesthetics. These creators are called stylists (which is a loose subset of industrial designers), and they are employed to make stuff look/feel nice - in the same way that engineers are employed to make stuff work properly, ergonomicists are employed to make stuff that fits us, marketers are employed to make sure the public want to buy the stuff etc.

Concepts like these are generally made either as marketing pieces by the very few design houses that focus solely on aesthetics, or by the very many design students who want to be employed by these design houses. These people are closer to artists than to designers, and they're certainly not engineers or ergonomicists. Car bodies are styled by hand - they always have been and I imagine they always will be. They're scribbled on paper, then made (first in quarter-scale, then in full-scale) by sculptors out of clay. Asking that bike's designer to work on the ergonomics is like asking the clay sculptors at Ferrari to design the engine. Or look at it the other way around - it's like criticising Ferrari's chief engineer for not making the turbocharger pretty enough. Of course there is some overlap - engineers have a sense of aesthetics, ergonomicists sort-of know how stuff gets put together, and industrial designers tend to combine a bit of all three etc.

If we didn't have people like this, most consumer products would look like shit, and I can tell you from experience that (with a few exceptions) ugly products, no matter how well they work, simply don't sell. It happens in the cycle industry (and the wider sports/recreation industry) more so than in most others (automotive being another style-driven industry) - I mean, do you think an engineer designed those graceful curves on your rear derailleur? No, your derailleur would work just as well if it were made from aluminium rectangles riveted together, which is what functional prototype derailleurs look like. But if they were released like that, nobody would buy them. Like I said, there's some overlap, so your average engineer could make a somewhat handsome product, but big companies can afford to hire these super-specialists to make a very talented team (and industrial designers tend to be the people who knit the team together). Even arms companies employ stylists, which demonstrates just how important they are.

In other words, the bike's not designed to be ridden, it's designed to show off the maker's sense of aesthetics to potential employers - and to hang on the walls of client meeting rooms. It'll remain an obscure bike and almost nobody will buy one, but that's okay because it's probably all over pinterest and on the pinboards of industrial design houses everywhere, which is an amazing thing for your portfolio - think of it as a CV that says 'I can take your ugly but functional prototype and turn it into something that is viscerally attractive and therefore easier to sell'.