Crafting prostheses with form, function, and flair

Abstract

Carefully contracting the muscles in his forearm, Maximilian Mahal labored as he picked up the drinking glass and set it back on the table. Maneuvering the tumbler with his own hand would have been easier. But on this particular day last December, Mahal and his classmates were at a digital fabrication laboratory in Berlin, learning to grab objects with a prosthetic arm, despite having all their own limbs intact. He struggled, to say the least. Master’s student Maximilian Mahal, working at Fab Lab in Berlin, tries out a prototype prosthetic-aid for computer users, called Shortcut, which employs wireless signals from amputee limbs to manipulate computer applications. Image courtesy of Lucas Rex, David Kaltenbach, and Maximilian Mahal. Amputees struggle as well. Adapting to prostheses has such a steep learning curve that many shun state-of-the-art devices and choose skin-colored limbs that function as little more than a stump. A group of engineers and artists recently came together to try to find a way forward. Scientists and engineers are good at making things and solving problems, yet they may not excel at fitting their creations into an evolving culture, says Chuck Polta, a research and development director at the German prosthetics company Ottobock (www.ottobock.com/en/). Polta wondered if he could enlist the creative firepower of the arts community. “Artists and designers often have a better sense of how technologies can be applied in ways to have a more meaningful impact,” he says. A collaboration began to take shape. Polta reached out to Berlin’s Weisensee Academy of Art (www.kh-berlin.de/) and Fab Lab (https://fablab.berlin/en/), an open digital fabrication studio. Their conversations spawned a new university course, “Artificial Skins and Bones” (https://skinsandbones.de/). The class challenged Mahal and others at Weisensee, mostly master’s students in product design, to consider nature’s patterns and functions and apply …