Play It Safe, The Swedish Way

The Swedish Road Administration (SRA) announced the winner of it's Bicycle Helmet Design Contest yesterday.

The winning contribution, out of thirty contestants, is a creation called "Hat Trick" made by Johan Birger, Gert Hanner and Esa Ervast from Avalon Industrial Design, Helsingborg, Sweden.

The jury's motivation is:

The winner has managed to reduce the size of the helmet by utilizing the properties of a multitude of materials. The helmet is only 15 mm thick with a shock absorbing layer of elastic foam material. Its design also makes the helmet better at cooling the wearer than traditional cycling helmets.

The helmet is very nimble and simple but still fulfills the current security standards. It gives the owner a multitude of choices when it comes down to looks and style by allowing different covers without the end result being overburdened. Hat Trick manages to free the bicycle helmet from the design related issues that keeps many people from using a helmet today.

Some example covers:

Well the covers gives me some flashbacks to the 60's when the Automobile Helmet was in style. But the stripped down version looks pretty cool IMHO. Today's helmet are way to big sometimes and I will for sure check this out when it hits production. A guy on the Swedish bicycle community www.happymtb.org has tried the prototype and was very pleased with it.

Check out some of the other contestants here (page in Swedish).