In safety town they really hammered it in our heads to “always wear a helmet.” But how many of us actually listened? I know I wasn’t going to be caught dead (well, hopefully not) wearing that…that thing on my head (granted back then I only rode around my neighborhood and currently don’t do very much bike riding).

But for two Swedish designers Anna Haupt and Terese Alpin, who wanted to achieve the impossible when designing an ideal bike helmet for an exam challenge, creating a new helmet concept that would outdo the “hard mushroom on your head” was way easier than they first thought.

Alpin and Haupt studied for seven years many different bicycling accident reports and spoke with various trauma specialists; they looked at movement patterns, how humans are affected by various collisions. And with all of this they were able to raise over 10 million dollars for the project, making their once dreamlike idea a doable reality. Meet The Invisible Bike Helmet.

I’d never considered the almost never-changing design of a bike helmet; why hadn’t anyone thought of this redesign sooner? The video below illustrates the two women’s story of how their ideas grew into what would be the Invisible Bike Helmet collar that turns into a life-saving airbag. And a fashionable one, at that.

The Invisible Bicycle Helmet | Fredrik Gertten from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

(via Adweek)