Profile

I design bicycles for Brompton, the folding bike maker, in London. I live in London with my husband in a little flat. He’s an atmospheric chemist. We’re both interested in the environment and living sustainably; we got an allotment at the beginning of this year and have been growing some of our own food. I love touring cycling, i.e. going on long trips by bicycle, my last trip was cycling down the coast of Pembrokeshire.

My job is to design new parts and features for the Brompton folding bike. I’m primarily a mechanical designer, that means I do solid parts and mechanisms. I’ve worked on redesigns of the lighting, saddle range, bell, and grips.

Right now my job is in two sections. I’m doing mechanical work on my main project of redesigning the bike frame’s hinges, and I’m also on secondment (being borrowed) by the Brompton Electric team to help with our eBike, which has a motor to help you pedal. On that project I’m doing software work. I’m writing code that tells the bike how to respond to you when you pedal.

Mechanical projects here follow the classic stage-and-gate design process. We define a brief, research to work out a specification, draw sketches and make models, test them, then we model in CAD and test again, iterating until we have something really good. If I’m in an earlier stage of a project I’ll be in and out of the workshop a lot, sketching and making things to try, getting people in the office to help me test. If I’m in a later stage, I’ll be on the computer more, drawing up what I’ve tested in CAD, writing to suppliers and meeting with my colleagues in the Production department so we work out how to get the design into production in large volumes.

When I’m working on Brompton Electric it’s different because code gets modelled and shaped on the computer instead. So the creative phase is a lot of flowcharts, maths, and coding in C. But what it does mean is a lot more test riding, I’ll take the bike out many times a day to see if doing A makes feeling B happen like I thought it would. I can record my rides and check the data afterward. Electric days are like a series of logic puzzles, and the key is to break it down into small tasks and prove out each one before moving on.