Adaptation, Part I: How the Eames chair came from leg splints, and why “disability studies” isn’t just identity politics
by Sara Hendren on 17/02/10 at 3:01 pm
In 1941, the husband-and-wife design team, Charles and Ray Eames, were commissioned by the US Navy to design a lightweight splint for wounded soldiers to get them out of the field more securely. Metal splints of that period weren’t secure enough to hold the leg still, causing unnecessary death from gangrene or shock, blood loss, [...]
affinities: Graham Pullin
From an interview in Dwell magazine:
Why do you think so few designers take up issues of universal design, or designing for disability? Is it a question of money, knowledge, a failure of the imagination?
As we’re coming to money later, let’s talk about knowledge and imagination. Many of the designers I spoke with did feel inhibited [...]
affinities: eric gunther
Eric Gunther’s OrganOrgan. His description: “OrganOrgan is a modular multichannel vibrotactile surface. The surface is made of twelve independently driven low frequency transducers and conforms to the shape of the sitter. It is a platform for the composition of organized vibrations for the body. A tactile symphony of gentle waves, rough bumps, and sharp jabs [...]
read moreprojects: speculative machinery (ongoing series)
I’m looking for collaborators to propose new tools—speculative machines—that invert or transform or exaggerate an adaptive aid that already exists. Here’s a first design:…
read more
projects: international lab coat symbol (ongoing series)
I’ve started a collaborative, public project designed as interventions in medical office waiting rooms, and I’m looking for partners.
I’ve made these postcard drawings of lab coats, and I’d like collaborators to place a card in one of the magazines that sit in waiting rooms, leaving them for the next prospective patient.
The dynamics of what happens [...]
read morethink aloud: happy accidents
From Mitchell Whitelaw’s Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life:
“New media art self-consciously reworks technology into culture, and rereads technology as culture. What’s more, it does so in a concrete, applied way; it manipulates the technology itself, with a nonindustrial latitude that admits misapplication and adaptation, rewiring and hacking, pseudofunctionality and accident. New media art also fractures [...]
projects: tools for historical imagination: jury duty
Tools for Historical Imagination: Jury Duty
Running Time: 7 min 35 sec
I’ve been interested in judicial service for a long time—the daunting responsibility of it, the chance to look inside the justice system, the human stories at the center of any case. After serving on a case in 2003, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow [...]
projects: search task
I’m collaborating with the Philosophical Psychology Lab at Gordon College, working with philosopher Brian Glenney on experiments with the vOICe, also known as the Seeing With Sound device. The tool utilizes a camera, embedded in a pair of glasses or goggles, and translates its intake into “readable” soundwaves through earphones—either assigning sounds to light and [...]
read moreaffinities: Lynn Bennett Carpenter
Lynn Bennett-Carpenter is a fiber artist based in Detroit. Her work is often interactive, often site-specific, and a number of pieces are wearable, neither proper clothing nor purely functional tools. I asked her specifically about pieces from her “Fittings” series, and from her “Elastic Experiment” works.
image description: two women in active poses, one appearing to [...]
read morere-blog: LED eyelashes!
Soomi Park’s light-up lashes, via Eyebeam.
re-blog: sleep suit for urban power nappers
The adaptable, take-anywhere sleep cocoon by Forrest Jessee—via Dornob.
re-blog: BigDog: a robotic tank mule for the future
This blew me away—genuine all-terrain robotics from Boston Dynamics. My collaborator Brian Glenney wondered aloud whether this kind of technology might, in another form, supercede the wheelchair model in the future? Worth watching all the way through, as this sentient-ish creature rights itself on ice, etc.
Unbelievable: Boston Dynamics BigDog (March ‘08) – Funny blooper videos [read more]
re-blog: USB drive in your finger
This hacker lost his finger in a motorcycle accident, so the doctor implanted a USB drive into his prosthetic finger.
Thanks, Zach, for pointing me to this!
re-blog: braille-friendly banjo tabs
an adapted tab system for banjo players with visual impairments, via Tangier Sound
re-blog: accident-explanatory slings
So many directions you could go with these:
via Craftzine blog
re-blog: can prosthetics be an unfair advantage?
Here’s Part I of a great discussion of the ways prosthetics—in their ever more sophisticated forms—are raising ethical questions about bodily augmentation and mechanical advantage. The image is of Oscar Pistorius, an athlete and bilateral amputee who’s been able to seriously compete against both able-legged runners and at the Paralympics.
re-blog: useless/useful
From Flong Blog, Golan Levin on how new media artists, working outside the mandates of utility and traditional research, are often uncredited sources for novel, sophisticated technologies. Issues of copyright aside, it shouldn’t be news that artists work in ways that circumvent linear problem-solving, and may, in the process, create technologies that are very useful [read more]
