Making Equity: How the Disability Community Met the Maker Movement
Abstract
I first read about the Open Hand Project and e-NABLE initiatives in 2013. Both were filling the mainstream news with heart-warming accounts, all centered around the exciting potential of anyone planning to 3D-print customizable upper limb prosthesis. A father made a “special” prosthetic hand for his own son. A teen produced mechanical fingers for a neighborhood kid born without any. Both groups were sharing their designs, inspiring a movement that seemingly revolutionized what could be made and by whom. As I am writing in 2022, these initiatives have taken separate paths. The Open Hand Project has become the Open Bionics company. It still produces myoelectric prosthesis using 3D-printing for affordability, but no longer uses hobbyist printers and has not shared the blueprints of their latest product, the Hero Arm.1 The Hero Arm has been clinically tested, approved and is offered through clinics; whereas e-NABLE has refined a small number of designs, to be used at one’s own risks and printed by volunteers.
But in 2013, these two projects were still a promise: that computer-controlled fabrication tools such as 3D printers could enable anyone, including disabled people, to become “makers” and design and manufacture anything at any time at will, locally and for a low(er) cost (Gershenfeld 2005). What if any person might design and produce their own technologies? Might this new form of production remake systems of inequality, oppression and injustice? Could consumers become active makers and creative citizens? Rooted in ideas of open-source software and electronics hacking, the global “maker movement” began to take shape in the 1990s. The movement increased its influence after the financial crisis of 2007-2008. But as illustrated above, 3D-printing underpins very different approaches to the design of assistive products; and interactions between makers and the disabled community take many shapes.
In this chapter I introduce the central discourses and hopes underpinning encounters between the making and disability community, and highlight why making is of limited help in facing the challenge of bringing assistive products to all who need them. I draw on seven years of direct involvement, from meeting stakeholders in this space, collecting projects documentation and exhibition catalogs, reviewing research or attending making events and organizations.
Origin | Files produced by the author(s) |
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