How an adaptive bike became a global design project
Noel Joyce turned a personal design challenge into an open-source project where students around the world learn by making something that matters.
3 min read
After a mountain-biking accident left him paralyzed, designer and educator Noel Joyce returned to the trail by designing a more capable, affordable adaptive mountain bike.
Through open-source Project Mjolnir, Joyce and NYU students around the world use Autodesk Fusion to collaborate on new designs, builds, and components that anyone can access and adapt.
Growing up in Tullamore, Ireland, Noel Joyce spent much of his childhood riding and tinkering with bikes, taking different components and reassembling them in different ways.
That passion followed him into adulthood, through work in a bike shop, military service, and adventure racing. Then, during a mountain-bike ride, an accident left him paralyzed from the chest down.
“I spent three months in rehabilitation in the hospital,” Joyce says. “The first time you go outside of the hospital door is the sort of make-or-break moment. It's the bit where you go, ‘All right, okay, I can manage in this world in this new way.’”
At 26, Joyce returned to school to study industrial design at the Institute of Technology in Carlow. After graduating, he launched hardware startups and later moved to Shenzhen, China, where he spent eight years as head of design for a hardware accelerator.
Getting back on the bike
When COVID hit, Joyce’s life and career took another turn. He returned to Ireland and began teaching remotely for New York University (NYU) Shanghai. It was during this period that bikes re-entered his life.
At that point, he found himself literally getting back on the bike, albeit with three wheels instead of two. One day, his neighbor saw him on it and suggested some trails in the nearby Slieve Bloom mountains.
“We set off on a Saturday morning,” Joyce says. “For the first time in 15 years, I rode down a mountain bike trail. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. The adrenaline was fully flowing again, and the bug had well and truly bitten. I was back on the bike.”
It wasn't long before Joyce was outriding the bike's capability. There were frequent failures, leading to numerous repairs. Mountain bikes can be pricey, but adaptive mountain bikes are “frighteningly expensive,” Joyce says. There wasn’t much of a choice in his mind. He needed to design his own bike for wheelchair users.
Noel Joyce’s principle for designing and making
“Take something that was out of reach and make it accessible to more people.”
– Noel Joyce, Professor at New York University Shanghai and Founder of Project Mjolnir
Share a principle for designing and making what matters most to you.
A global classroom for inclusive design
With Autodesk Fusion, Joyce began to address these challenges with his own adaptive mountain bike design. But he didn’t stay solo for long. For the past five years, he’s brought NYU students from campuses around the world along for the ride, iterating multiple new versions and builds of the bike and components with what is known as “Project Mjolnir.” As an open-source project, anyone can access the project to customize and make their own.
Using Fusion, Joyce and students can collaborate wherever they are and bring new ideas to life. They even had the first adaptive mountain bike ride in New York City across the Brooklyn Bridge and have taken it as far as a build-and-ride event in Mongolia.
Project Mjolnir is about more than building a better adaptive mountain bike. It gives students the chance to design and make something that matters beyond the classroom—using their skills to remove barriers and open opportunities that once seemed inaccessible.
With every student who joins the project, Joyce is helping ensure more people can experience the freedom, exhilaration, and possibility of riding a mountain bike.
