MAGURA

Gustav Magenwirth GmbH & Co. KG

Type: Industry

Country: Germany

As a manufacturer of bicycle and motorbike parts, especially brakes, MAGURA is rather an engineering company with sports applications than a sports engineering company.

As for any user interface on safety-critical sports equipment, user ergonomics and interface intuitivity play a vital role in the development of our brakes and other actuation devices.

The engineering effort spent on ergonomics during product development is probably as large as the effort spent on functionality and cost engineering. But different from the other disciplines, user interface development does not follow well established processes and is rather trial and error with many probands conducting ergonomics studies.

Sports Engineering Competences

As mentioned, sport engineering competences at hand are limited. But we do have current and former mountainbiking professionals at hand to aid in ergonomics decisions. As an industrial company focused on development, production and sales of sport products, our competences lie rather on product engineering, sourcing and production of high-end performance sporting goods.

One goal for MAGURA in this project is to evaluate in which fields and to what extent a Sports Engineering employee might aid MAGURA in user interface design and what quality gain on the user interface could be achieved.

Fellowship Opportunities

Insight into industrial sporting goods development (for engineers), especially hydraulics, design for manufacturing, design for assembly, cost engineering, process engineering for commercially successful products.

Ideally jointly develop a process / an idea for ergonomics metering for hydraulic sports products and such products for IoT-era products, to be able to quantify ergonomics and to be able to make complex design decisions more objective.

Also, we are very open to out-of-the-box-thinking. Just because people have always braked by applying a force to some lever, it does not have to be like that in the future. A different, ideally scientific approach to user interface development, especially for sporting goods, would be very interesting to us. Maybe someone is interested in collaborating on a subject in this realm.

For students, various internship and thesis subjects in sports product development (pre-IoT or IoT), ideally focused on user experience, user benefit and ergonomics and of course any good jointly developed idea on ergonomics metering projects.