The Project Mjolnir adaptive MTB design is showcased at Idaho’s Challenged Athletes Foundation … More
Noel Joyce is an ex-military guy from Tullamore, Ireland, who now lives in Shanghai and teaches for the NYU branch there. He was paralyzed from the chest down in a mountain biking crash back in 2006. He found himself confined to a wheelchair yet nonetheless wanted to get back out on the trails. But he discovered that the existing products available for that purpose were less than optimal. An industrial design professor by trade, he took the bull by the horns. Enlisting the help of his students, he put together his own open-source modular design for an e-assist full-suspension hand-crank tricycle MTB.
Yes, it does sound like the script of a movie the guys from RiffTrax could have some fun with.
But it’s also true. And it all comes together in the work Joyce calls Project Mjolnir.
“I was involved with bikes from very young age,” Joyce told me in an interview. “Just loved tinkering with bicycles and messing around with them.” That passion led him both to work for a time in a bicycle shop and to fall in love with riding.
It was during his first real career–the one with the Irish military–after he had been deployed overseas in Africa for five years that tragedy would strike. “I had my accident mountain biking that left me confined to a wheelchair, yeah?” he explained. “And I finished that career, and that’s when I went back and I studied industrial design with no clue what industrial design was.”
He quickly discovered what it was all about. “How do we turn a new technology into a customer facing thing, or something that people understand and use?” he said. “That’s the kind of work I tried to do with my students here… That’s great that there’s a new technology, but how do you explain it to someone? How can you make it into a form that people can use every day? How do you close the gap in the imagination? And the other part of what I teach students about is learning about disability as a driver for innovation. Sure, and the reason being, not just my own selfish reasoning and interests, but we all end up in that category at some stage.”
Trying to get back onto the trails
Everything would start to come together when Joyce decided to try to get back onto his beloved mountain bike trails and discovered that the “solutions” on offer for people like him were less than ideal.
“So I had a very simple bike… a rigid-frame affair with 26-inch mountain bike wheels,” he said. “I started to take this out onto the trail, and I kept breaking it.”
A prototype displays some of the mechanical complexities involved in the Project Mjolnir design.
Looking for a better solution, he quickly ran into other big roadblocks. “I had some ideas of what I wanted to do, and I’d seen some bikes that existed, but they’re in the region of $20,000 to $25,000. Like, regular mountain bikes are insane money, but adaptive equipment is just another level again. You can imagine how inaccessible the sport is to anyone with a disability.”
Joyce discovered that even the high-end offerings were easily broken and cost-prohibitive to repair. So he did what any self-respecting industrial designer would do and set out to solve the problem for himself.
Building a better mousetrap
It was the way he went about it that set him apart. He focused on both functionality and affordability, using standard-dimension components, parts that could be readily machined, and assemblies that bolted together to facilitate repair. He added an electric motor assist because, as he pointed out, steep hills and a hand crank drive don’t much like each other. Along the way he enlisted the support of Autodesk, designing his machine in their Fusion software. Most important of all, he made it open source so anyone could add to and improve the original designs or completely redesign it for other forms of accommodation.
Noel Joyce and his students work on a prototype of the adaptive MTB.
“So the goal was to contract the time it takes to repair a bike to the same as what would be for a regular bike, and then to try and do that by making it open source and allowing it to be something that anyone could build and try to get the cost down as well, to a third of what other bikes were costing,” Joyce explained. “My belief is that no one should have to go and look for funding, or do Go Fund Me, or try to get grant aid to buy a bike, to do a sport, to do an activity that’s a hobby. Yeah, because they already have to spend a lot of money on a regular wheelchair, adaptations that they might need in a home.”
Joyce’s work has already garnered him some big fans. His software providers at Autodesk are completely won over. Mary Hope McQuiston, their VP of education experiences, shared her thoughts with me via email. “Noel’s story is a testament to technology’s power in unlocking creativity, fostering empathy, and driving meaningful change,” she said. “Using Autodesk’s Design and Make Platform, Noel embraced open-source design to truly democratize innovation. Through his work across the NYU network, he has made sure that students across disciplines gain the skills to tackle real challenges for real people. When knowledge is shared openly–across university networks and beyond–the potential for positive change is limitless. And when students gain hands-on experience with the same technology that industry professionals are using, they strengthen their durable skills that will connect the next generation to meaningful, impact-driven careers.”
Kari Byron of Mythbusters fame is another supporter. She learned about Joyce through Autodesk thanks to their sponsorship of her STEM education efforts with her new company EXPLR. She recently hosted him on her “Office Hours” livestream show. Connecting with me via both email and an interview, she said, “He’s pretty awesome. I mean, I’m a bicyclist as well… Creating solutions for inclusivity for the outdoor industry opens up an entirely new market. It will also boost existing products sales. Gloves, gear, and all the accessories that are part of every outdoor sport will benefit. Everyone should have the incredible experience of the natural world and all it has to offer. I mean, I like how adaptable it is, because we know that everybody has sort of a different interface issue when it comes to the physical challenges.
“I liked that he was able to pivot quickly with his designs to make it accessible to people,” she continued. “Just being able to include people out in the outdoors is such a difficult task, and to be able to accommodate is so cool.”
The designs Joyce and his students have developed have come a long way since he started, “I love it,” he said of the current iteration. “It’s lighter. We’ve done lot of cool stuff with camber at the rear, changing up some stuff around motor position, weight position. What’s super-interesting about adaptive mountain bikes is I feel like they’re at the point where regular mountain bikes were in the late ’90s. We’ve managed to get them down to about €8,000, maybe less than $9,000, to build.”
The full-suspension MTB trike in action.
What comes next
Joyce is currently focused on further refining his design and enlisting support from additional sponsors and fellow designers alike. Meanwhile, he’s also promoting adaptive MTB build sessions and outreach events across the world, including far-flung spots like his current home in Shanghai, his boyhood home in Ireland, Mongolia, the U.S., Abu Dhabi, and so on.
He’s also looking to the future.
“One of the things I think about is, how do we design the first adaptive mountain bike for the Paralympic Games? Adaptations that we can do with current bike technologies are super-important. I see voice-activated shifters that can help my friend who’s a quadriplegic, you know, all these different things we’re reimagining, the adaptation of that piece of technology that goes beyond what people might even realize they’re doing it for… Yeah, it’s a bit of a reach and a bit of a wild one. But we need these dreams, right?”
link
