Created in 2020 as an add-on for the e-bike hiring service of the same name for hotels and companies, the new Pirelli CYCL-e around App is offered as an accompaniment for urban cyclists (and others) for their daily journeys and during their free time, via a special satnav dedicated to cyclists, including suggestions for itineraries and places of interest: a technology which is simple and accessible to everyone for getting about without emissions and without stress.
Today, just over a year after its début in the main stores, the CYCL-e around App is amongst the platforms selected for the ADI Design Index 2020, as the candidate from NTT DATA in the category “Design of Services”. The Japanese multinational, active in the realm of innovation, is indeed collaborating with Pirelli for several projects, including the e-bike hiring service.
Every year, the Permanent Design Observatory selects the best Italian design products, which compete automatically for the ADI Design Index Innovation Award, one of the principal awards of the sector, and for the ADI Compasso d'Oro, one of the most authoritative world awards for design, which was launched in 1954. Among the competitors, this year there is also CYCL-e around.
The CYCL-e around App: user-friendly, technological, sustainable
The CYCL-e around App has been designed to favour a sustainable type of mobility and offers two main functionalities: the satnav, optimised for safe and calm pedalling, and a suggestion for itineraries and places of interest worthy of exploration.
The satnav is simple and user-friendly: you just need to input the departure point and destination to launch the navigation process, choosing the most bike-friendly itineraries available, which include cycle pathways and roads with little traffic. The cyclist can also interact in real time with the App, by notifying closures or problems encountered during the journey and, in this way, updating it with a view to further improving the itineraries to be shown to its users.
Furthermore, anyone who wishes to discover the places of interest and itineraries suggested by Pirelli can do so by completing a brief registration process. As of today, the itineraries loaded are limited to the localities in which the cycle hire service is active, but very soon these will be extended to wider areas.
Pirelli and the ADI Design Index, a history of design which has been ongoing for over 60 years
The candidacy of the CYCL-e around App is just the latest stage of a long journey undertaken by Pirelli ever since the very first edition of the Compasso d'Oro, in 1954: that year, one of the winning companies was Pigomma srl, a company producing toys which was part of the Pirelli Group, with its little foam rubber monkey called Zizì, designed by Bruno Munari. Through the Fifties and the Sixties, during the economic boom and the height of Italian industrial design, Pirelli secured awards in various industrial sectors in the context of the Compasso d'Oro Award: from the Cifra 5, an electro-magnetic wall clock with flip-over numbers designed by Gino Valle for the Solari company, winner of the “Figura” Award in 1956, to the 1982 Compasso d'Oro for electronic indicators for airports and stations, through to 1964, with the award for the design of the Milan Metro M1 Red Line, for which were commended the two famous architects Franco Albini and Franca Helg, together with the graphic designer Bob Noorda. The project for the M1, the first city metro line connecting Sesto Marelli with Piazzale Lotto, had seen Pirelli figuring amongst the companies involved with the profiled rubber flooring, the first example of rubber surfaces in European metro lines, manufactured by the Società del Linoleum (Linoleum Company), a sister company of Pirelli's which had been active since 1898. From the Sixties we move on to 2012, with the inclusion in the ADI Design Index of the exhibition “The soul of rubber. Aesthetics and Technicology in step with fashion”, curated by the Pirelli Foundation and winner of the Red Dot Design Award 2013, ending with the candidacy of the publishing project “La Pubblicità con la P maiuscola” (Pirelli advertising with a capital P"), in the last edition of the Compasso d'Oro.
