The Light Rider is meant to be ridden, but you could probably carry it if you really wanted to. The skeletal motorbike weighs just 77 pounds. For comparison, a BMW GS tips the scales at around 550 pounds. A Harley Davidson Fatboy? 725 pounds.

To be fair, the Light Rider wasn’t designed like your typical motorcycle. “We wanted it to be really silent and lightweight, like a bicycle but with the speed and stability of a motorbike,” explains Stefanus Stahl, a designer at APWorks, the German Airbus subsidiary responsible for the motorcycle. The Light Rider achieves that balance with a 3-D printed, aluminum-alloy frame that resembles a web of metallic bones. Look closely and you can see the bike’s mechanics peeking through the gaps in its frame, like organs through a ribcage.

The Light Rider's funky form is the result of a technique called generative design, an emerging design field that touches fields from architecture to product design. Where a designer might traditionally imagine how a chair, motorcycle, or building might look and then build a prototype herself, generative design places the job of prototyping into the hands of a computer algorithm (hence generative design's other name: algorithmic design). “Generative design is when you state the goals of your problem and have the computer create design iterations for you," said Jordan Brandt, Autodesk's resident futurist and a pioneer of the generative design method, when we spoke to him last year. Instead of building a model from foam core, the designer identifies a set of constraints—size and weight requirements, for example, or a desired outcome—that the algorithm uses to determine the form and function of its prototypes.

APWorks

The Light Rider's designers specified variables like seat height, wheelbase, and the position of the bike's foot rests and handlebars. They also outlined how the bike should perform under certain conditions. “We figured out, for example, what loads occur when a person sits on the Light Rider and hits a bump,” says Niels Grafen, another designer on the project. Based on these inputs, the APWorks algorithm generated a series of shapes optimized to withstand all the stresses a motorcycle with these specifications might encounter— all while using as little material as possible. “When you break it down, you just have material in the places where it needs to be,” says Grafen. The designers tweak the software’s blueprint and then send it to a 3-D printer where it’s fabricated in 14 different parts that are later welded together.

It's no accident the motorcycle looks skeletal. In fact, a lot of people like to think of generative design as a form of accelerated evolution. It's not a perfect analogy (for starters, evolution is not an optimization process—nature is riddled with hilariously inefficient, ineffective, and otherwise bad designs), but the algorithmic design process does respond to parameters much in the way evolution responds to selective pressures. When evolution and algorithmic design select for similar things—strength and weight, for example—the output can look similar.

The Light Rider's frame is a good example. The structure is most robust in areas where the motorcycle feels the most stress, like near the engine and rear-wheel shock absorber. In some ways, the bike's skeleton is a visual representation of what’s happening when someone rides a motorcycle. The final form is incredibly light, but strong. “Even though it’s standing still, it needs to look fast,” Stahl says. Similarly, Stahl says a motorcycle should look like it has heft—but weight is not a prerequisite for strength.

The Light Rider isn't the most high performance bike on the market. It'll only run about 75 miles per charge, and tops out at about 45 miles per hour. But as Stahl puts it, the Light Rider isn't meant to be ridden through the Alps. At least not yet. The team is working on another version that will be able to go faster and farther. Still, if you want to drop the $56,500 it’ll cost to buy one, Stahl says the Light Rider is fun as hell to ride. “It’ got a brilliant acceleration,” he says. “It really wants to wheelie because it has so much power.”