Newswise — Two Olin College professors have launched a website focused on making DIY tools accessible to help people with disabilities perform daily tasks and, along the way, offer a more expansive view of the maker movement. Since its launch the site has touched a chord among educators and the adaptive technology community, resulting in more than 7,000 visitors—and many more thousands of page views—in just the first few weeks.
Inspired by Cindy, a Massachusetts woman who lost both of her legs and varying amounts of each of her fingers following a catastrophic heart attack, Engineering at Home is a resource created by Assistant Professor of Design Sara Hendren and Professor of Anthropology Caitrin Lynch, together with help from Olin College students William Lu, Mary Martin and Toni Saylor.
“We hope Engineering at Home will be a source for teachers and students to get ideas on new ways to think about technology and innovation in relation to disability, and it can also help people with disabilities to feel empowered to solve their own daily challenges,” says Lynch.
In order to perform everyday tasks, Cindy “Macgyvered” workarounds to common problems she encountered every day: opening a jar, selecting medication from a pill bottle, eating a sandwich. There are dozens of adaptations on the site, gathered under action-word headings such as hold, grasp, and squeeze. The just-a-click-away solutions range from adhesive wall hooks to help opening jars, a carabiner handle to carry a purse, to a small soft grip tube that helps Cindy apply make-up. Visitors to Engineering at Home are encouraged to create and adapt their own workarounds as they see fit.
On the site Hendren and Lynch write: “Cindy is not alone in adapting her environment with informal engineering—we know she joins millions of garage tinkerers, household inventors, and, of course, participants in the Maker culture.”
Too often, according to Hendren and Lynch, the focus in rehabilitation engineering—and the media—revolves around expensive, high-tech prosthetic devices. Cindy, who has a $90,000 myoelectric hand, eventually realized her self-engineered, inexpensive and low-tech workarounds were more useful to perform simple tasks. This is often the case, says Hendren, who teaches an advanced design course at Olin, Investigating Normal: Adaptive and Assistive Technologies. "Our culture tends to value high-tech innovation exclusively, leaving aside the deceptively humble objects that make daily life possible for so many people with atypical bodies,” says Hendren. “We wanted to show this ingenious array of devices in a way that does justice to the exemplary engineering they represent."
Including a woman like Cindy—a 69-year-old grandmother—in the maker movement is just one-way Hendren and Lynch hope to expand definition of who is a “maker” beyond the current culturally accepted definition. As they write on their website’s manifesto: “Some of Cindy’s skill lies not in creating new technologies, but in seeing things differently …. The technologies that are most useful to Cindy are flexible, multifaceted objects like tongs and sponges, elegant in the simplicity and universality ….We want to recover a nuanced understanding of engineering’s history of invention that includes craft, assembly and appropriation—right alongside advances in material sciences and innovative technique.”
Hendren and Lynch are not alone in pushing for adaptive technology to shift its focus from high-tech to low-tech, from expensive “fixes” to inexpensive workarounds. Engineering at Home drew inspiration from several other adaptive technology projects, including Zebreda Makes It Work, Maker Nurse, Farm Hack and the Adaptive Design Association.
Caitrin Lynch has been teaching at Olin College for 12 years. In addition to her research, Lynch co-teaches “Engineering for Humanity” at Olin, which is a course focused on a client population of senior citizens that introduces students to engineering problem solving. Cindy was a community partner for the course in 2015 and Lynch’s students engineered a set of 3D printed fingers to help Cindy do various daily tasks, such as gift wrap presents for her grandchildren.
Hendren’s work is focused on adaptive and assistive technologies. She teaches courses in human-centered design and socially centered design practices.
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