New book discusses marrying innovative design to disability equipment

From The New York Times:

LONDON — It was when his friends asked him to quit that Hugh Herr knew he’d succeeded. After losing both of his legs in a teenage climbing accident, he had managed to climb again by designing a set of telescopic prosthetic legs that can be lengthened or shortened to suit the terrain. The climbers who’d once pitied him, called for him to be disqualified from competitive free climbing, claiming that his “super-legs” gave him an unfair advantage.

Unfair or not, he has another advantage in his day job. As director of the biomechatronics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, he is at the forefront of prosthetics technology. His work there helps to improve the lives of millions of people, from stroke victims to amputees, as well as enabling him to develop the best possible legs for himself.

Dr. Herr is one of the heroes of a new book, “Design Meets Disability” by the industrial designer, Graham Pullin. The book, published by The MIT Press, acts as a manifesto by condemning many of the existing products designed for people with disabilities, and challenging designers to use their skills to develop inspiring alternatives.

Let’s start with what’s gone wrong. I asked Tom Shakespeare, the British medical sociologist and disability rights campaigner who’d recommended Mr. Pullin’s book to me, to identify the typical shortcomings of products for disabled people. His list was depressingly long. Clumsy, expensive, inefficient, undesirable and unsuitable were just some of his complaints, along with “patronizing names” like “Helping Hand” for what he calls his “grabber.” “It’s a pair of jaws mounted on a rod with a trigger action handle to grip and release things, very useful for picking things up off the floor or from a high shelf,” said Mr. Shakespeare, who has achondroplasia, a genetic condition that restricts arm and leg growth, and is confined to a wheelchair.

The “grabber” is an honorable exception. Many of the products intended to help disabled people are woefully sub-standard. One problem, according to both Mr. Pullin and Mr. Shakespeare, is that they tend to be developed not by designers, but engineers, who often focus on functionality to the exclusion of everything else, including how they look and feel, and whether anyone will want to use them.

Another issue is that too few of the most talented designers ever tackle such projects. Mr. Pullin devotes part of his book to speculating about what might happen if, say, Jonathan Ive, head of design at Apple, applied the design sensibility that produced the iPod Shuffle to hearing aids, or the furniture designer Jasper Morrison worked on wheelchairs. A third problem that is too many products are developed by people who, unlike Dr. Herr, do not have disabilities themselves, and have not devoted enough time and effort to find out exactly what the users want and need.

Mr. Pullin recounts his experience as a designer at the IDEO design group, when two visually impaired people were hired to help develop a voice-controlled PDA, or hand-held computer, for a German company. Their experience of using similar devices enabled them to identity potential pitfalls that might have been missed in conventional consumer tests, such as varying the speed of synthetic speech so that it can be slow at first, and become faster once people are accustomed to hearing it. He is convinced that their input helped to produce a better product for everyone who used the PDA, regardless of whether or not the person was visually impaired.

As well as making products for disabled people more efficient, designers need to imbue them with flair and diversity, Mr. Pullin argues. Take wheelchairs. Tubular steel models were introduced during the 1930s, inspired by the metal furniture of modernist designers, like Marcel Breuer. They remained unchanged until the 1970s, when the Veterans Association in the United States lobbied for sportier styles, which would be more suitable for young war veterans. Wheelchairs have since become increasingly sporty, but as Mr. Pullin points out, one design stereotype has simply been replaced with another, which isn’t necessarily to everyone’s taste.

A more encouraging example is eyeglasses. Once classified as “medical appliances” by British doctors, they now come in countless styles, bear the names of famous fashion brands and are routinely sold with clear lenses to people who clearly don’t need to wear them. Tellingly, their designers often make no attempt to disguise glasses — or “eyewear” as they are now called — as they do with many other products, implying that it is somehow shameful to use them.

Mr. Pullin calls for designers to apply the same creativity to other products, giving their users the same breadth of choice as in eyewear. This raises formidable — but exciting — challenges. Those designers not only need to meet the complex physical needs of the users and their desires, but to address other issues, such as the degree to which they wish to disguise their disability or enhance it. A revelation for Mr. Pullin during his work on hearing aid design at IDEO was the discovery that many deaf people prize their deafness as part of their identities, and have no wish to hide it.

The same problems apply to prosthetics. Despite advances in functionality, such as the new i-LIMB “bionic hand” from the Scottish company Touch Bionics, few people have as impressive a choice of limbs as Dr. Herr. Among them is another hero — or heroine — of “Design Meets Disability,” the American athlete, actor and activist, Aimee Mullins, who is also a double amputee.

Her armory of prosthetics ranges from the running blades with which she broke two records at the 1996 Paralympics, to the cheetah’s legs and glass legs she wore in “Cremaster 3, ” a film by the artist Matthew Barney, and an extensive wardrobe of cosmetic limbs.

One of her favorite stories is of arriving at a party in a pair of especially long, elegantly shaped legs to hear a friend say: “Oh Aimee, that’s not fair.”