Client Spotlight: Para Rowing Foundation
- hannahwalker930
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
For many rowers, the seat is everything. It’s the point where the athlete connects to the boat, influencing comfort, confidence, safety, and performance. Yet for PR1 and PR2 athletes, many current seat and back support systems simply aren’t designed around real bodies, real training, or real competition.
This is something the Para Rowing Foundation (PRF) knows first-hand. Working closely with para athletes, coaches, and support teams, they’ve seen how limited adjustability, poor comfort, and high costs can hold athletes back.
Rather than accepting that as “just how it is,” PRF decided to do something about it.
Why This Project Exists
Para rowers train and compete at elite levels, but often have to adapt to equipment that doesn’t truly meet their needs. Seats can be uncomfortable over long sessions, difficult to adjust, and expensive to produce, which limits access and consistency across clubs and countries.
For athletes, this can mean discomfort, reduced confidence, and greater reliance on support staff. For the sport, it creates barriers to participation and progression.
The Para Rowing Foundation set out to change that, with a clear goal: to design a better, safer, and more accessible fixed rowing seat and back support system, one that improves performance while being realistic to manufacture and use around the world.
Why We’re Involved
At Inond, we care deeply about projects that make a real difference to people’s lives.
Our approach is human-centred, which means we start by listening to para athletes, coaches, and those who use the equipment every day. We don’t begin with assumptions or off-the-shelf solutions. We begin with lived experience.
Our role in this project is to help turn those experiences into practical design and engineering decisions, and to support PRF not just with a product, but with a long-term innovation partnership that aligns with their wider mission in para-sport.
What the Project Involves
This project brings together athletes, designers, and engineers to create something that genuinely works in the real world.
It includes:
Working directly with athletes and coaches
Observing real training and competition environments
Designing a more comfortable and supportive seat
Improving adjustability so athletes can fine-tune their setup
Making setup quicker and easier, with less reliance on support staff
Designing with manufacturing and cost in mind, to support wider access
Prototypes are tested on the water, feedback is gathered, and designs are refined, again and again, until the solution feels right for the people using it.
Where the Project Is At
The project is now well underway.
Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with PRF to define the vision, priorities, and performance goals for the project. Following formal project launch, testing has taken place in both the UK and internationally.
In the UK, on-water testing at Marlow Rowing Club with Paralympic gold medallist Gregg Stevenson helped validate early design ideas and highlighted areas for improvement. International testing at the PRF Intensive Training in Portugal allowed us to see how the system performs in high-intensity training environments and gather insight from a wider group of athletes and coaches.
Key learnings so far include the importance of better adjustability, long-session comfort, anatomical fit, and clearer setup feedback to improve safety and confidence. These insights are now shaping the next phase of design and development.
Looking Ahead
'The focus now is on further identifying the right problems to solve and refining the solutions that matter most. The aim is a fixed seat system that is people-centred, inclusive of as many para rowers as possible, and uncompromising on performance at every level of an athlete's participation.
My recent appointment as an advisor to the Para Rowing Foundation reflects the foundation’s commitment to collaboration and to advancing the sport globally. This work also directly informs Inond’s wider practice, strengthening how we challenge assumptions and shape solutions for other projects and organisations that may never have been exposed to these considerations, but benefit from them through us.'
- Benn Klewpatinond, Founder of Inond.
Interested in supporting this project, or have an idea rooted in real experience?