The February 1931 edition of Fawcett’s Modern Mechanics and Inventions evokes a time when heavy industry and comic-book fantasy occasionally met, fell in love and conceived a blueprint. On the magazine’s cover, a watercolor ferryboat with the rotund form of a Graf Zeppelin bulldozes pastel waves, kicking up whitecaps for dolphins to frolic in—a scene perhaps better suited to a Tintin adventure than a proto-Popular Mechanics. Inside, photo essays depict earnest backyard tinkers, clenched fists on hips, soberly regarding the makeshift contraptions that had leapt from their imaginations.

Among February ‘31’s featured enthusiasts were three Washington men posing with a set of inflatable glider wings. Using nothing more sophisticated than a tire pump, they forced air into fabric-wrapped rubber tubes, forming a surprisingly rigid wingspan that could securely attach and detach from a glider’s ultra-light fuselage. This concept would be adopted later by Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company for a Cold War-era project commissioned by the US Army: the Inflat-o-plane. Ultimately the Army rejected an aircraft that could be brought down by a well-aimed arrow, but the maligned Inflat-o-plane’s subtler legacy was not so vulnerable to punctures: Modern transport, even aeronautics, was possible using non-rigid materials.

Following decades of relentless specialization, where a motor-cycle designer might never break bread with a naval engineer, today’s transportation designers have rediscovered the benefits of broad, inclusive approaches to their fields. This cross-disciplinary awareness has also elevated the discussion of materials, particularly how savvy choices can encourage flexible, collapsible, re-tractable, even stackable solutions to our century’s unique transportation challenges.

That is not to say all designers have been waiting for material technologies to catch up with their ideas’ sophistication. One of today’s most elegant collapsible-transportation solutions employs humble stainless steel. The S and S Torque Coupling joins and secures two metal tubes together, providing bicycle manufacturers with a super-strong bridge of sorts between pieces of bicycle frame. The device is comprised of two couplers: trapezoidal teeth at each coupler’s end interlock and are then covered by a quick-tightening steel “torque sleeve.” This incredibly rigid device arguably finds its sexiest application to date on the Freeman Transport Track Bike, launched last year. The couplers join at two points on the bicycle’s custom-welded steel track frame, allowing for quick disassembly and packing in a handsome waxed-cotton travel case.

Freeman's Transport Track bike folds to under half its size

The ideal of packing down light and fast is not confined to terra firma. Produced in New Zealand, FirstLight’s foldable kayaks have developed a rabid international cult among paddlers. While pack-able kayaks are nothing new—the canvas Folbot Aleut has been on the market for nearly two decades—FirstLight has dressed the concept in emphatically 21st century finery. Wrapped in a urethane-coated polyester skin, the FirstLight 420C’s frame employs injection-molded components and Kevlar/carbon/fiberglass tubing, bringing weight to about 20 pounds. The frame breaks down and packs away in 30 minutes, ready for a hiker’s weekend in the backcountry.

The Freeman Track Bike and First-Light 420C are coveted, successful products precisely because their form languages make no outward accommodation for their collapsibility-enabling features. However, some transportation firms are taking the inverse approach, entrusting materials themselves to dictate new form languages that are daring yet still commercially sensible.

“With the GINA, we let the materials do the talking,” Chris Bangle, BMW’s former Chief of Design, explains. “They determined what the car would look like, not a designer. We didn’t approach it dogmatically; instead we said, ‘If we use cloth, what might it convey emotionally?’”

Flexibility for the sake of eliciting an emotional response was not, however, the GINA’s objective. In its eight-year development, the GINA spun lessons off that found application, ironically, in BMWs’ sheetmetal. “The GINA was about getting away from entrenched notions about how a part should work in its capacity,” Bangle says. “This was applicable to metal, too: thinking flexibly, not fixed. That’s why we now employ non-fixed tooling. A robotic arm [shapes] the M-spec Z4 hoods that you see leaving Spartanburg [South Carolina, where BMW has an assembly plant]. Those same flexible qualities that appealed about cloth, we’ve been able to convey in metal.”

Showcases like the GINA exist as philosophical exercises as much as engineering ones, Bangle concedes. It will be interesting, then, to watch the progress of the City Car, aka Stackable Car, the venerable MIT Media Lab’s latest headline-grabber. (The elite graduate program began shipping its $199 OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) to underprivileged schoolchildren worldwide in 2007.) Their vehicle reframes entire urban transit networks around fleets of electric micro-vehicles that can contract and stack in neat curbside rows. Students are still hammering out a prototype, so materials have yet to be disclosed. But the car’s digital renderings are at least suggestive of a hydraulic or gas-strut folding mechanism enabling collapsibility.

Most refreshing about these and other collapsible-transportation products is their distaste for homage. Materials have set designers free either to respond to or establish new styling trends—be it Freeman’s acknowledgment of track bicycles’ mushrooming popularity as daily riders, or the GINA’s clear influence on newly re-leased production vehicles whose body panels resemble origami. Materials are encouraging industry and fantasy to fall for each other all over again in transportation-design studios. This time, however, the resulting blueprints are being put to work.

Jonathan Schultz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. His articles on automotive and product design, consumer electronics, and bicycle jousting have appeared in The Los Angeles Times magazine, I.D., Intersection and on BBC TopGear.com. Jonathan's travel guidebook credits for Dorling Kindersley include Boston, Buenos Aires and many locales between.