// BRIEF
Reinvent the training at home experience for cyclists, addressing product and experience pain points.
6 months
4 Industrial Product Designers
1 UX Designer
User research
Experience Design
UI Design
01
/ BRIEF
Van Rysel is Decathlon's high-end cycling brand targeting high performance athletes. They came to us with an open brief: imagine the future of home training for cyclists. Current solutions work, but the experience around them falls short.
Five of us took it on, with monthly reviews from their team. And the first thing we had to do was ask what a "pain cave" even was. The name sounds brutal, but the reality is mostly logistics.
A pain cave is where cyclists train indoors. It gets its name from the fact that cyclists must embrace the pain to surpass themselves and perform at their best.
A pain cave is a very flexible concept; essentially, any place where a cyclist trains at home is a pain cave. And it's composed of a variety of objects & devices working with each other.
// EVERYTHING THAT GOES IN A PAIN CAVE
According to Van Rysel, on a one-hour session, cyclists spend around 13% of their time setting all this up and tearing it back down. Not riding, but assembling, then packing away; every single time.
02
/ ON THE FIELD
Van Rysel handed us a persona and a number. We needed the rest. I led this phase: wrote the interview guides, ran the shadowing sessions, briefed the four product designers so they could interview on their side, then pulled everything back together into insights.
None of this really shows up online when you're looking for paincaves, so we asked cyclists to send us photos of their own setups, and the gap was hard to miss.
Aesthetic & organized
Messy & improvised
// Tidy-up ask - VERBATIM
"My family thinks I'm taking too much space"
// Illustrations by Samudra Guenegou
Setup was a real issue, cyclists confirmed it, and it stayed our first priority. But it was one dip out of seven. The boredom mid-session and the teardown landing right after the proudest moment of the ride were just as heavy, and neither of them was on the brief.
Deploying and packing away, every single session.
Heat, clutter, and space borrowed from the whole household.
Boredom mid-session, and training because you have to.
03
/ PRECONCEPTS
A shopping cart is annoying to push in real life, that was our raw material. Game feel was the job: turn the friction of a clumsy object into the pleasure of a well-tuned one.
OUR 3 preconcepts
A small device with a simple screen that tells you when you're going too fast or too slow, and lets you follow a personalised session.
They liked the first two. But this one was exactly what they were looking for, it even went up on their inspiration wall.
Van Rysel wanted something they could put into production. Our school wanted a vision project, home training as it might be in five or ten years. That second ask arrived after the three axes had already been presented, so we ended up with two briefs running on different clocks.
// THE CLIENT'S CLOCK
Manufacturable within two years, close to the existing range.
FOCUS · SUPPORT · ADAPT
// THE SCHOOL'S CLOCK
Home training as it could be, five to ten years out.
EVOLVE
2025
2027
2032
The three axes had been built around Van Rysel's constraints and they held up in review, so we kept them as the answer to that brief. For the school, we pushed the horizon further out and worked on a single object instead of three.
04
/ FINAL PRODUCT
Evolve replaces the pile with one object. It unfolds for a session, folds back afterwards, and holds the bike when it isn't in use.
Each of the decisions below came out of something we saw or heard in the field.
Everything that used to be scattered is built in, so a session starts by unfolding a single object.
Airflow ramps with the intensity of the session, which cools the rider and gives back some of the sensation of speed.
In winter it earns its place in the living room. In summer, integrated wheels make it easy to roll out to the garage.
Folding faster and cooling the room fixes the moments around the session. The middle of the ride, where riders lose interest and start counting minutes, needed something else.
05
/ THE APP
The object takes care of the room around the session. It does nothing for minute forty, where riders told us they stop training and start counting down. That part needed software, and it became the second half of the concept.
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In the interviews, riders talked about people they knew like a training partner or a friend who had pulled ahead. Nobody mentioned their rank among strangers. So the screen opens on one person rather than a position in a table.
Riders train three to five times a week, and rest days are part of the plan. A daily streak would have broken constantly and punished people for training properly, so the counter runs in weeks. Missing a session doesn't reset anything.
Starting a session is one tap, from anywhere in the app. The object was built to unfold in a single move, and the same rule applies here: the app shouldn't add friction back in front of a session the hardware just made easy to begin.
06
/ CONCLUSION
We presented the final concept to Van Rysel in February 2025. The three axes had already closed their brief a few weeks earlier; Evolve sat further out than anything they could put on a production line, and it was received as what it was: a picture of where indoor training could go.
We kept showing the work to cyclists over calls, and several of their reactions went straight back into the design. But asking someone what they think of an idea is not the same as watching them use it. We never built a working prototype, so nobody ever folded the object in their own living room, and nobody ever reached minute forty with the app running. What we finished with was a mockup of intent and a set of people describing what they thought they would do.