Product designer Nahuel Villar, born and raised in Argentina and now based in the United Stated, rebuilt the bicycle bell from a single observation: the object is legally required in over 40 countries, present on millions of bikes, and works only half the time. That failure rate came not from insufficient volume but from insufficient vocabulary — every bell says exactly one thing, at exactly one intensity, regardless of whether the moment calls for a polite nudge or an urgent warning. Villar’s response, called Intent, treats that gap between mechanism and meaning as a design brief rather than an acceptable limitation.
Field research pointed the design toward graduation, not amplification. Through journey mapping, user interviews, and direct observation, one pattern kept surfacing: pedestrians can’t read a standard bell’s signal, and cyclists have no way to know if their warning landed as intended. The instinct to just make bells louder would have missed the actual problem. A single-volume bell isn’t underpowered — it’s mute on the question of urgency, unable to distinguish a friendly heads-up from a split-second hazard.
A ratchet, cam, and retention springs do the interpretive work. Villar’s mechanism converts a single physical gesture — the same press a cyclist already makes out of habit — into three distinct outputs. Each additional press escalates the volume by one level: soft, moderate, maximum. The bell doesn’t ask the rider to learn a new motion or master a second control. It asks the existing motion to carry more information than it did before.
Escalation replaces repetition as the bell’s working logic. Where a standard bell only offers the same ring struck harder or more often, Intent’s three-tier volume system gives a cyclist a genuine choice matched to the moment — soft for a shared path with room to spare, maximum for a pedestrian stepping into a bike lane without looking. The gesture stays instinctive; only the range of what it can say changes.
A translucent upper casing turns the mechanism into the explanation. Rather than hiding the ratchet and cam system behind an opaque shell, Villar left it visible from the outside, letting the moving parts communicate how the bell works without requiring a manual or an icon. The object explains its own logic through its material choice — transparency doing the job that instructional graphics usually handle.
Anodized brass carries the sound, not just the housing. The bell’s body was selected specifically for density, resonance, and finish rather than for cost or weight savings, meaning the acoustic performance is built into the metal itself rather than bolted on as a separate speaker or resonating chamber.
The redesign targets a genuinely old object. The bicycle bell’s basic acoustic problem — how to make a small mechanical strike audible and recognizable — was solved in 1877. Villar’s thesis is that solving the sound was never the same problem as solving the message, and that the second problem sat unaddressed for close to a century and a half after the first one was closed.
A comparable instinct — rethinking a mandated safety object from its underlying assumptions rather than its surface — drives Škoda’s DuoBell, a bicycle bell redesign engineered to penetrate active noise-cancelling headphones by targeting a narrow frequency gap most ANC algorithms fail to filter. Both projects start from the same premise: that a hundred-year-old warning device wasn’t actually broken at the mechanical level, it was miscalibrated to a world it was never designed to signal into.
A similar rethink of what a bike safety object is even for shapes Ventete’s aH-1 inflatable helmet, which replaced rigid foam with pressurized air chambers not to look different but to solve the actual behavioral obstacle — bulky helmets people stop carrying. Intent, DuoBell, and the aH-1 each treat a familiar safety object’s real design flaw as invisible until named, then solve precisely that flaw rather than restyling the object around it.
The claim worth sitting with is a narrow one: that a graduated bell changes behavior only if cyclists actually use the extra presses in the moment, under the exact time pressure the object exists to handle. A three-tier system that works cleanly in a design studio has to prove it survives the half-second decision window of real traffic — the test no press release or prototype video can fully settle.