Project Mjolnir: Open-Source Design, Education, and Adventure

NOEL JOYCE: Hi. My name is Noel Joyce. I am an assistant professor at NYU Shanghai. I'm an industrial designer with experience working in consultancy with several multinationals and hardware design work with over 200 different startups. I currently teach design and innovation at NYU Shanghai and also run a project called Project Mjolnir, which is part of NYU Tandon's VIP program.

I don't know if anyone was at this talk last year, but a little over 11 months ago, I told the story of Project Mjolnir. I won't go back over everything because that will take up the entire session. I will, however, give you a rehash or summary of last year's talk and then bring you up to speed with what has happened in the last 11 months. And it was a pretty crazy 11 months.

So what is Project Mjolnir? Project Mjolnir is an open source adaptive mountain bike for wheelchair users that is based around a platform that can be changed, upgraded, adjusted, or customized by anyone building the bike. It's currently utilizing machined components to form the frame, and this frame is held together by standard metric fasteners that you can find anywhere. It's all made from 7075-T6 aluminum. And it's a very robust, solid platform. The bicycle components used for our project are all standard, off-the-shelf components, which can be found in any bike component seller or retailer.

But where did it all start? Well, the project originally started as a result of my own frustrations with adaptive mountain bikes. I initially had a bike that I used to go mountain biking on, but ended up with frequent failures, and I began coming up with concepts of what I wanted from a bike and tried to engage adaptive bike manufacturers in an effort to get these concepts realized.

I was lucky that one manufacturer was interested. I think everyone thought I was some sort of a crackpot. But I ended up working with that company. And it started out as a really great, big step forward in the development and building of this bike. But soon enough, I managed to be able to break this one, too, and we ended up with situations where I was stuck in the forest.

The bigger problem was not-- the breakages were the big problem, obviously, but it was the cost of repair and the time frame for the repair. I began to understand that I had no choice but to wait and to pay exorbitant amounts of money to a manufacturer just because this was a specialist bike.

Realizing I had no choice if I relied on a manufacturer for parts, I decided to design and make the entire bike myself. This way, I could get parts made on demand and quickly. I also knew if I ever had an issue or broke a component or part that I had designed, I could replace and repair those parts with minimal cost and effort.

As I'd seen that I wasn't the only one with these frustrations, I decided to make this project open source so others could build their own bikes. And if they wanted, they could contribute to the overall development of the project themselves, too. People with disabilities have less time and pay more to enjoy the activities that give them a better quality of life. I wanted to level the playing field to some degree by decreasing the cost of a capable bike from 20,000-plus euros to 8,000 euros for a full suspension, electrically assisted, adaptive mountain bike.

So what happened since AU23? Well, the short answer is a lot. Let's get into the journey and how we leveraged Fusion in particular to do some amazing work in education and to help more people with disabilities do incredible things.

First, let's meet a few people. This is Declan and Gabi. I first met Declan and Gabi in early September of this year. Declan is a wheelchair user and champion hand cyclist from Ireland, and he lives in a town not far away from where I live. Gabi is about to embark on her academic journey in college, studying sport, and she is also a wheelchair user. Her family is originally from South Africa but now live in Ireland. They were part of a group who did something remarkable this year, but we'll catch up with them again later on in the talk.

In Las Vegas last year, I took a chance as part of the trip to speak at AU23 to go and meet a lady by the name of April Wolf, who happened to be in Las Vegas for an adaptive cycling event. April is the lady in the red jersey on the left as we look at this image. April works for the City of Reno Adaptive as a therapeutic recreation specialist. I took my iPad with me to show April the work we were doing at NYU on building an adaptive mountain bike.

And I was able to show her videos of the bike and explain the modular platform and how the bike went together using none other than the Fusion app on my iPad. I found it incredibly useful as a communication tool. We discussed the project a little, and over a few emails, decided we were going to build a bike together.

Networking at these events that we're at today can be so rewarding. What I didn't realize was how much was going to happen because of that meeting.

Heading back to Shanghai, after an amazing week at AU23, we at NYU began working on the further development of our next prototypes of the two versions of Project Mjolnir, the rigid framed version and the full suspension version. Our aim was to decrease the cost of the build and complexity of the parts. We also set about creating some quality-of-life solutions to solve problems on how do we manage cables and hydraulic break lines. As well as this, we developed some cool, functional prototypes of things, like storage systems for tools to be used on the bikes.

Fusion played a vital role in the efforts we went to in the development of the new full suspension frame design. We spent many hours during the semester exploring new design ideas and solutions to the problems we both were able to anticipate and the ones that were not immediately obvious. While we were doing this work in Shanghai, we also had a team in New York City made up of students, both from NYU campus in New York and Abu Dhabi, working on concepts which we continue to explore as part of the VIP program at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

As we continued development, we kept testing, evolving, and tweaking the bike further. We took the bike along the banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, riding on and off ferries, exploring the city-- probably the first time ever it's been done on a handcycle. These adventures helped us to understand what was working or not working and to adjust and change our Fusion designs. The added benefit was being able to make designs and have parts machined and shipped in days while being in Shanghai.

Remember April from earlier? Well, she put us in touch with this guy, Wilson Dippo, who is from Challenged Athletes Foundation. Wilson is based in Boise in Idaho and an avid mountain biker and a design engineer in his own right. Wilson wanted to learn more about the project, and I had a call with him while I was in Shanghai. On that call, I was able to show him the Fusion design files and send them to him for review. He had a look at what it was all about and asked us would we be interested in coming to an event in May 2024 to build a bike. Of course, I said yes.

Back in Shanghai, our semester was wrapping up. In our Fusion sessions, we had generated dozens of new ideas and resolved many problems. We had managed to get to a version of the full suspension bike which was much easier to make, and we set about having those parts manufactured.

For transforming the bike in Shanghai from a rigid frame to a full suspension, it was necessary to get these parts in February of 2024. Laura, our design engineer, and her team, who are based in Shenzhen, work diligently to ensure the frames met the specification of our Fusion files. It was exciting for our students to see how their ideas that they created in Fusion came to life, and they were able to connect with a manufacturer on the other side of the world.

When the parts arrived, we built our subassemblies and were able to do some initial shakedowns in Shanghai. This was vital for us to learn how our ideas would perform.

And these new concepts now realized would see some serious action later in the year. It was funny, as we drew quite an audience of people who were interested in seeing a wheelchair user riding down the stairs. We were testing a bike, but we were also performing a type of entertainment for local people.

Having reached out to a group of disabled people in Shanghai, a conversation started around building three bikes for an epic journey through inner Mongolia. We began planning for when we would build the first of these bikes for testing. And in March of 2023, our students-- or 2024, sorry, our students and a group of wheelchair users began assembling a bike at NYU Shanghai.

What was critical about this interaction was that we were now actively working with people with disabilities, together, building these bikes. It was no longer just us building the bikes. We were working with groups of people with disabilities. Our work was helped by being able to use Fusion to view the model of how the frame should look as it was constructed.

The requirement for a bike with a lower center of gravity and a lower price meant that we would be building a rigid version of the bike for this group. We were able to adjust geometry quickly by redesigning only a couple of parts for these requirements. This bike was successfully deployed and ridden on a recce cycle in inner Mongolia earlier this year. Another milestone for our project-- a bike that people with disabilities actively assembled and built themselves, and those same people now riding that bike in Mongolia. It was awesome to see this happen.

At the end of April, I returned to New York City to regroup with the student team who had been working on new concepts and further developing our full suspension bike. We began building the bike with the goal of participating in the Five Boroughs Tour, which is an event that takes place every year in New York. It's a 40-mile bike ride that takes in all five boroughs of New York City, and a really, really great day out.

Phil Caridi, the co-instructor on the project, ensured that we got this bike built in two days. We also had several people with disabilities visit us at Tandon and ITP in Brooklyn to check out that bike. First highlight of the year was completing the Five Boroughs Bike Ride. Even on a wet day, it was an incredible way to see the city of New York without any traffic to hinder us.

Back in Ireland, a guy named Paul Norton, who is our participation manager at Cycling Ireland, reached out to me. Cycling Ireland is cycling's representative body in the country of Ireland, and it was great to get chatting to them about the project. One of my own personal objectives with this project is to try and get one of these bikes at every trail center in the world.

I believe that starting to do that has to happen somewhere like Ireland. It's a smaller country. It's a bit easier to do because we can get those bikes to those locations. And the first part of the objective of getting them everywhere in the world was to put one of these bikes at every major trail center in Ireland and then to heighten awareness of the sport itself, to have the first-ever adaptive mountain bike race in Ireland. And we're due to do that, I hope, in 2025. This would help establish the sport in my home country.

I met with Paul in May, and we had a great chat about all things bike-- this was in May 2024-- asking Paul, Are we going to do this? with reference to building a fleet of adaptive mountain bikes in Ireland. He said, absolutely, yes. We were going to do something incredible.

After working closely with Wilson at the Challenged Athletes Foundation, the time had finally come to build a bike in Idaho. Here's a short video telling the story of how that went.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- Oh, it's insane. Like, the fact that everything is, like, machined parts that was just laid out on a table yesterday morning, and I come in, and I'm like, this looks like a mess. And now we have a rolling chassis, like, a day later.

- Like, I had ask, you know, why did you use this kind of bearing right here? And it was like, well, because everything's adjustable for individuals.

- Being that it's open source, you can get the design for the parts, take it to a machine shop, and have all the parts cut and everything done. That's the great part.

- Having something like this kind of gives me the motivation to figure out what else-- what else is out there, and, like, heck, after doing all this, I want to get into CAD a little bit to modify the file a little bit on this to make it a better fit for me, you know?

- Yeah, I can't wait to see how it performs. Today, got a chance to ride with Justin. And it's a really fun bike to ride behind because it's got the two rear wheels. And so you see the suspension in action. There's just a sense of excitement. It just feels really cool. It's completely capable. It's able to get out there, into the Boise foothills, which is what we want it to do.

- The bike is no longer just a mode of transport or something to have fun on. This one here that we're looking at right now has stories attached to it. We shared, how did any of us end up with our situation? We share that camaraderie. And there was fun times, and there was a little bit somber times and whatnot as well during this process, the bike being the thing that brought all of those stories together and bonded us as a group, building the bike. I think those moments are really, really powerful.

- And did I mess up a few screws? Yeah. But it was the learning, heh. Do we have to angle grind one of them out? Yeah. [LAUGHS]

[END PLAYBACK]

NOEL JOYCE: So that was a great time. But moving on, about what happened next, right? So returning to Ireland from Idaho, work began on the most ambitious effort in the whole of the project to date. Cycling Ireland had committed to building five bikes to be located at the major trail centers in Ireland. And this meant figuring out everything in multiples and doing work that I wasn't so familiar with.

It also meant developing new skills and content for teaching our students in the next semester, which was a huge benefit. Surely, it's as easy to build five bikes as it is to build one, I thought. I was completely wrong, but more on that later.

Returning to the US again for the third time in the year, I began building another bike with the City of Reno Adaptive Organization. This is April's organization. This build went smoothly, as we had prepared pretty well for its execution. It wasn't without its drama, as we were short a few bolts, and being a bit away from hardware stores, we had to improvise by cutting bolts to length. It taught me to make sure that we get extra of everything. Bikea, unlike IKEA, is a bit more complex to do. We got this bike built, and I was the test dummy taking it into the Sierra Nevadas onto specially built trails for adaptive riding.

The bike went beautifully and is now part of the Reno adaptive fleet of equipment. People being involved not only riding the bike, but also building it, ended up having a more unique, holistic experience of adaptive mountain bikes. Learning about how the bike works helps riders to understand why it has certain characteristics and how to change them to get the most out of the bike.

Just before we built the bike in Reno, I was fortunate to have been invited to speak on a panel at the Autodesk Education Summit. I will always attempt some outreach effort, wherever-- whenever I go to a new city, as evidenced in Las Vegas last year. And Chicago was to be no different. I took the chance to cold call into the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab not far away from the location where the event was taking place.

And I got talking to some people there. It was a great conversation. And, of course, my iPad was with me, and the Fusion file was open while I told the story of the project. I just had a conversation with Derek Daniels from the AbilityLab, and we're going to get a group of people together from the lab to build a bike in Chicago in 2025.

Back to Ireland again, and some testing of new components and some neat new upgrades that were created in Fusion. We were only a few weeks away from racing, so this was important. We had tested these very parts in Shanghai a couple of months earlier, and it was time to really hammer those parts down a bike-breaker of a trail. I knew later in the year we were going to race this bike and bringing it to some big bike park trails. I had to make sure our designs were going to stand up to that. I also wanted to get back onto my own stomping grounds.

While back in Ireland, a few people had heard about the project and reached out to me. One of those people was Lee Corcoran, who less than a year previously had an accident which left him confined to a wheelchair. Lee has-- was an incredibly capable mountain biker and raced BMX at a very high level. He was also instrumental in the development of programs for community youth groups in Ballyfermot and County Dublin.

We set about building Lee's bike with a few people from his local neighborhood coming in to help us out. It was one of the highlights in a year of highlights for me to help someone else who has done so much for their own community. Lee is back out on a bike and riding with the group in Ballyfermot again.

Ryan Stevens, one of Ireland's most well-known design industry leaders-- he was a founder and CEO of Design Partners, now part of PA Consultancy, for many years. Brian wanted in on the project and offered to fund a build of a bike for the Glencullen Adventure Park in Ireland. Not only Brian, but another person named Gary O'Keefe offered to build another bike in Ireland. We rapidly went from one bike existing in Ireland, my bike, to potentially having 10 by the end of the year.

And then in the UK every year, there's an adaptive mountain bike race at the Malverns Classic Festival. It's also a unique chance to meet other riders, people in the bike industry, and in my case, test the bike further. In this instance, but not intentionally, we were able to test the weatherproofing of the bike. Got absolutely soaked during the race.

We also hung out with Gee and Rachel Atherton, pictured here. Both are MTB racers, or mountain bike racers, and Rachel is the most dominant female in the history of downhill mountain biking. This family is mountain biking royalty. They founded a bike company themselves in recent years, and they used 3D printing and machining in the manufacture of their bike frames. So you can imagine the amount of CAD that's involved in that.

I think that there's so much innovation going on in mountain biking, and they are-- that company are pushing the boundaries, too. Hannah Dobson from Singletrack magazine stopped by to chat about Project Mjolnir and wrote an article highlighting the bike and its features. Our team back at New York University-- all those students who worked on the project were so excited to see that she thought that this was the most interesting bike of the year.

To really test some of the assumptions around some of our new features and how they worked, we took the bike to Bike Park Wales to really push it hard on some bigger trails. Our design allowed for varying setup to test how things like camber, length, shock, stroke, et cetera would affect the bike. We believe there's big opportunities to learn about why it performs the way it does and also to consider external factors to the bike itself, such as type of disability and how it reacts.

The bike has huge ground clearance compared to all our adaptive mountain bikes in existence, yet remains stable. We began thinking, why? And we don't really know. So now we believe that deploying sensors to measure telemetry will help us understand what we have done. We began thinking, how can we execute on that back at New York University? The bike absolutely flew on the trails there, but with telemetry and data analysis, we believe we can make it even faster.

During August, we began the journey of building not one, not two, but this fleet of five bikes with Cycling Ireland. Before we met at Cycling Ireland's HQ, based in the Sport Ireland campus, we were able to brief the people who would be involved in the builds and show them how the bike would go together.

We were able to share the first versions of an instruction manual for some elements and use Fusion files for the rest. This helped the group create the frame modules, and then we were able to assemble the bikes. It was an absolute monster of a task, but we had some great fun doing it.

Define how long it's going to take something, and then double it. That's a lesson I learned from this process. We were doing everything we had done before, except this time, it was for five bikes. The issues we ran into were not so much build related, but logistics related. Some of the bike parts we needed were low on stock, which meant we were on the back foot with a deadline approaching for getting these bikes onto the trails on Saturday, the 7th of November, 2024.

The day before we were due to get people on the trail, the last parts arrived, and in my backyard at home, we were able to put the final touches to the last bike an hour before we transported them to the Trailhead at Kennedy and into the Slieve Bloom Mountains.

On the 7th of December this year, after a chaotic summer and designing and building bikes all over the world, we achieved the biggest goal to date by establishing the sport of adaptive mountain biking in Ireland. Six riders, including myself, headed into the forest, first to learn how to ride the bikes, and then up into the hills for some proper trails. Of the group of four men and two women, only two had prior experience of adaptive mountain biking.

To think that we only began this project at NYU a little over a year and a half before this special date, that we only produced the first sketches in Fusion not long after the project beginning on that day, and that those few mouse clicks would lead to these bikes being made, was really awesome. I don't think we could have done that without the ability to leverage the Autodesk software the way that we did, that being able to do the design, being able to communicate, being able to work remotely, all these different things-- being able to do this globally at all of our campuses at NYU, and to be able to share those files with multiple individuals and organizations, amending, developing, and improving the bike all the time.

The thing about that day, along with every other story this year, was that this work we were enabled to do, that other people with disabilities could be part of, broke down barriers most of us didn't even know existed.

Declan, who we see here in the white going down the trail, had never been in a forest, or on a mountain trail, for that matter, in over 25 years. His son Graham rode with us that day, and both Declan and Graham found a sport that they could do together that was exciting and exhilarating. They now can explore where they couldn't go before, which is pretty amazing. Imagine a quarter of a century of barriers completely obliterated in a few hours. Declan might never forgive me, though, because buying bikes for Graham is going to get pretty expensive.

Projects like this affect not just the individuals who design and build these bikes. When someone gets to explore a forest and be in nature or an environment they never thought they'd see-- that is a pretty incredible moment. And beyond that individual is often a parent or a family member who has never seen-- who has seen them do extraordinary things just to live their lives, seeing them struggle, but on days like this, seeing them find something incredible.

I think that Gabi's mother, Debbie's, messages say it all. And I hope that projects like this-- through this kind of thing, we create new status quo, that we never have to experience the barriers in the first place.

And while we're creating these incredible machines and stories, we continue to see how we can improve and develop the current bike and other versions. It's often been the case where we do something in Fusion, make the part, and the only way we can know what it truly is going to do is to test it on the bike.

We think there's an opportunity to have electrical engineering as part of the bike's development by using sensor platforms to understand the performance of the bikes, so we're looking at Eagle and using that with Fusion in further development. This will be useful for creating digital profiles for how the bike may function for different types of disability. Further reducing the cost and complexity of the bikes parts may be achieved by our students getting more time in CAD Cam capabilities of Fusion.

The more work we do on the bikes, the more opportunities we uncover or problems that we find. We are currently developing concepts for those problems or solutions to store and deploy these amazing machines. We receive funding and support to design and develop a setup for people to be able to use these bikes, including storage and facilities to help with transfer to and from wheelchairs into the bikes.

This means coming up with new, innovative ways to create a full-service experience at trailheads, and we're working closely with organizations in Ireland to achieve this and will in the future use what we learn to do. This year, it looks like we will build a total of at least 12 bikes. We may even reach 15.

This little project has captured the imaginations of adaptive sports organizations, such as Maine Adaptive, Disabled Sports, Eastern Sierra, and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab mentioned earlier on. They can see the value of building their own bikes, being able to maintain and repair those bikes, and if and when needed, being able to change parts with minimum downtime, making sure they have functional equipment all of the time.

The cost of the fleet we built with Cycling Ireland, five bikes, was 40,000 euros. To give you a comparison, a bike of similar capability from a manufacturer is at least 20,000 euros before taxes. You can build five of our bikes for the price of two bikes from a manufacturer.

The value is more than just those five bikes themselves, though. It's the experience of building them, the educational journey that begins when someone wants to learn Fusion so they can adapt those bikes further. The benefits go way beyond just the bike.

While we are incredibly busy working on this project, there are many sub-projects involving Fusion and its ecosystem. One of the other things we're doing is to help build these bikes remotely with people by using Fusion as a guide in real time to assemble the bike in real time. Currently, we're using Cadasio to explore how we could create step-by-step guide to assembly. And we've created spreadsheets of parts required for a build that are almost all found online, which further enables a build to occur anywhere in the world. We use standard fasteners that are even available on Amazon. We will continue to use all of these capabilities and Autodesk software to create in-person builds and remote builds.

Gary and Corby, pictured here, are embarking on the journey of learning Fusion and tapping into their own potential as unique problem solvers. By helping people like Gary and Corby do this work, we can create a community of designers, creators, and makers of things that have lived experience that many of us don't know now, but will ultimately experience. Learning how to create solutions for those of us with disabilities will only benefit every human who will ever exist.

Companies are waking up to this future and the financial reasoning in engaging those with disabilities. After all, we all end up disabled to some degree in the later stages of our lives, and that can be a better lived existence with more accessible products, experiences, and services. There's an enormous amount of untapped potential in those with disabilities, like Gary and Corby, to positively affect the future of every human being.

One of the things I see in Idaho was this, two kids racing each other on adaptive bikes. Both of them are wheelchair users. They're riding less sophisticated and quite heavy bikes that, in my opinion, need to be a lot better. They also cost an extraordinary amount of money. And when parents are caring for a child with disability--

There's also the case that the different disabilities require different solutions, and the cost of these solutions can be incredibly prohibitive. Continuing to develop the platform will help us help more people. We intend to use Fusion in all of these endeavors.

Last year, I talked a bit about Rachel and Ahmed and Trista and how, when it was possible for them to get on a bike, that to them, it was a great day, something I, myself, highly value, something that when you can utilize a regular bike is easy to take for granted. With Project Mjolnir, I think we're going in the right direction in achieving the goal of anyone being able to have great days, regardless of ability. And that's in no short thanks to Fusion and the work we were able to do.

To recap, it's been a pretty incredible year. Well, it's been less than a year. It's 11 months. And we've covered so much ground, metaphorically and physically, with this project. We did things we didn't even think was possible in that time frame. And we helped others do things they didn't think they would do in their lifetimes.

We're already gearing up for next year and continuing our educational journey at NYU with this project. But sometimes, we can be quite distanced from the result of our work. And when we're interacting with the Fusion environment, we might not see that immediately. And ultimately, it might not be what you expect. Those results are often connected to emotion. And a lot of the time, that emotion is happiness. And happiness always comes with a big smile. Thank you.