What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They've looked, but they haven't understood its form, they haven't decomposed it…

The first bike is missing its chain stays, the bars connecting the bottom bracket to the rear axle and the ends of the seat stays. Wikipedia has a nice diagram with the names of all the parts of a bicycle [1]. There are real bike designs that have a monofork (a one-sided fork, e.g. the Cannondale "lefty"), a monostay, or a solid body instead of top & down tubes (e.g. many folding bikes or the extremely aero Ventum One [2])…

IMO it's underappreciated how these mistakes are not a bug of human intelligence, but a feature. They reveal a default non-literal interpretation of the world, which can be made less abstract when needed. However, it's the default abstractness that prevents us from making gross contextual errors based upon a literal interpretation.