Nomad
A modular cargo rail for e-bikes: one extruded spine, eleven accessories, and a mounting interface designed to be operated one-handed, in gloves, without looking down.
- Year
- 2023
- Category
- Mobility
- Role
- Industrial Designer & Mechanism Design
- Client
- Confidential — e-bike manufacturer
- Timeline
- 9 months, field research to production intent
- Team
- 2 ID, 3 ME, 1 test engineer
- Status
- Production intent, launching 2025
The brief
The client had a strong e-bike platform and a weak accessory ecosystem — a pannier rack, a top box, and a series of third-party clamps that scratched the frame. They wanted a first-party accessory line. What they described was a catalogue; what they needed was an interface.
We spent three weeks riding with couriers in two cities, which is where the real constraint surfaced. Nobody removes an accessory in ideal conditions. They remove it wet, cold, gloved, in a hurry, usually while holding something else, and frequently in the dark. Every clamp on the market assumes two bare hands and good light.
So the deliverable became a mounting standard first and a product range second. Get the interface right — blind-operable, one-handed, tolerant of grit and ice — and the accessories become straightforward. Get it wrong and no amount of catalogue breadth saves it.
What the research changed
Three findings did most of the work. Each one closed off a direction we had been treating as obvious, which is the only reliable sign that research is earning its budget. Methods: contextual inquiry across eighteen sites, competitive teardown of six units, and two rounds of formative testing with printed rigs.
Everything happens one-handed
In 41 observed mount and dismount events, riders had both hands free exactly four times.
Rattle is a trust signal
Riders judged a mount as “about to fail” based on audible play long before any actual loosening occurred.
Grit is the real enemy
Every failed third-party clamp we inspected had failed at a sliding interface packed with road grit, not at a load-bearing member.
Four decisions that shaped it
One spine, eleven attachments
The rail is a single 6082-T6 extrusion with a dovetail channel and an indexed tooth pitch of 12.5 mm. One die serves every frame size — it is simply cut to four different lengths — which collapsed the tooling budget and made the accessory range genuinely open-ended.
The blind-operable latch
A single over-centre lever engages the dovetail. The lever is over-sized and cammed so that the last fifteen degrees of travel produce a distinct mechanical click you can feel through a winter glove. We tested seventeen lever profiles with gloved riders before settling; the winner was not the one that tested best bare-handed.
Designing for grit
Every sliding surface was moved out of the dirt path or given a self-clearing groove. The dovetail faces sit on the underside of the rail; the latch pocket has a 3 mm drain slot. We salt-fogged and grit-cycled assemblies for 400 hours and measured retention force before and after.
Load path and testing
Rated to 27 kg static and validated to EN 11243 with a safety factor of 2.4. The rail transmits load into two frame bosses rather than the seatstays, which let us keep the accessory mass high and rearward without the handling penalty the client's previous rack suffered.
Specification
The long tail of the programme was tolerance stack-ups, part consolidation and assembly sequencing, run jointly with engineering. Headline figures from the released specification below.
Outcome
Numbers are the fastest way to make a case study credible, so include them even when they are modest. If a programme was cancelled, say so and say what you learned.
Credits
Work shown with permission. Some details altered or omitted under NDA.