Strutt's Chief Designer Explains Their Powered Wheelchair Battery

Strutt's chief designer has walked through the development of the battery for the company's powered wheelchair in an interview published by Core77. The conversation puts a spotlight on a component that users interact with constantly but that rarely receives the same design attention as frames, controls, or seating.

The battery sits at the center of a powered wheelchair's usability envelope. It determines how far a user can travel, how long they wait during a recharge, and how much the chair ultimately weighs. When a battery fails or underperforms, the user does not experience it as a component problem — they experience it as a loss of mobility, independence, and reliability in the middle of a day that was planned around a working chair.

That framing matters for interface and industrial designers because a battery is not just an energy storage part. It is a system with touchpoints across the product: charge indicators the user must read at a glance, charging ports they must locate and connect, thermal behavior that affects where the chair can be stored, and replacement procedures that determine whether the product remains serviceable over years of use. Each of those touchpoints carries accessibility weight. A charge gauge that a low-vision user cannot read, or a connector that requires fine motor precision, converts a routine action into a barrier.

Core77's interview with Strutt's chief designer covers how the team approached these questions during development. The designer walks through the decisions that shaped the battery, giving readers a rare first-person account from inside an assistive technology company at the component level. First-person design narratives of this kind remain uncommon in the mobility sector, where companies more often communicate through finished product launches than through the engineering trade-offs beneath them.

For designers working in assistive technology, interviews like this one serve a practical function. They document how constraints — energy density, weight budget, safety requirements, cost, and user routines — were balanced against each other in a real program. That documentation helps the field build shared knowledge about which approaches survive contact with actual users, as opposed to approaches that only look viable in isolation.

The piece also arrives at a moment when powered mobility design is drawing broader attention from the mainstream industrial design community, as aging populations expand the user base for mobility products and expectations shift from purely clinical equipment toward products designed with the same rigor applied to consumer hardware.

Readers can find the full interview at Core77, where Strutt's chief designer covers the battery's development from initial requirements through to the decisions reflected in the shipping product. Expect the conversation to inform how other assistive technology teams communicate their own component-level work in the future.