Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center is presenting one of my designs in Design with the 90%, an exhibition curated by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Design with 90% features more than 26 innovative projects from around the world that showcase “design solutions toward a more equitable world by increasing access, improving health, and empowering opportunity for the most marginalized communities around the world”, proving design can be a force for social change. 

The need for prosthetics is high in countries with large numbers of amputees caused by disease, landmines, and natural and man-made disasters — resulting in hundreds of thousands of new amputees per year.

Globally, over 30 million people need mobility devices such as prosthetics. 80% of the world’s amputees do not have access to modern prosthetics, and over 9 million above-knee amputees in the developing world do not have access to the prosthetics they need. 

If you live in the developing world and lose a limb, you instantly lose your chance to work and provide for your family.

Veterans and other amputees in the US can receive titanium and carbon fiber knee joints that cost upwards of $20,000 to $80,000 for robotic versions. But these prosthetics are vastly out of reach for billions of people who live on less than $4 per day. For the 3 million people in developing worlds who lose their legs each year in transportation accidents or war torn areas filled with decades-old and new landmines, their budget is less than $100. There are little to no options for this sect. If available, existing low-cost affordable knee joints use unstable single-axis — similar to a door hinge.

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I had the opportunity to work with nonprofit D-Rev and designed the ReMotion aesthetics and housing from concept to production. 

At $80, ReMotion Knee is the world’s cheapest low cost, high-performance knee joint for above knee amputees in the world. The polycentric concept utilizing four-bar linkage geometry began as an invention by Stanford University and was even hailed by Time magazine as one of the “Best Inventions of the World” in 2009. 

San Francisco based design nonprofit D-Rev acquired this concept and took it to production. D-Rev designs and builds medical technology that people in the developing world can afford in under-served populations.

Another example of D-Rev’s designs is Brilliance; an affordable blue light treatment for babies with jaundice. It is estimated over 6 million babies with severe jaundice are not receiving proper treatment, resulting in severe brain damage, kernicterus, or death. Yet jaundice is so easy to treat, simply requiring an intense blue light onto baby’s skin.

By 2015 nearly 7,000 amputees in clinics from 28 countries like India, Ecuador, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines, Guatemala, Afghanistan and Fiji were fitted with ReMotion Knee.

Few people understand what it’s like to depend on others or devices just to move and when you don’t have that ability and independence how much more difficult and depressing life can be. I believe that just because you’re poor (and disabled) it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve mobility and a chance to contribute to society.

Below are some of my preliminary drawings and concepts for ReMotion Knee.

In 2004 I graduated from College for Creative Studies. I majored in Industrial Design, focusing on Automotive but also product. Industrial Design is not the engineering side, yet the design side which imagines, draws and designs every product around you from cars, cell phones, shoes, sunglasses and planes. We then work with engineers to bring our concepts to production.

While in school I began experiencing a betrayal of my body. As I was thrown into an uncertain future and a tumultuous diagnosis search for what was happening to my body, my addition of assistive devices like leg braces and a cane only grew.

While I was part of the automotive studio side, I knew my heart always belonged to products that live beyond the consumerism label and actually helps individuals. As someone who was struggling to limp from class to class, I knew my future possibly belonged to a life full of prosthetics and even a wheelchair. As I looked at products for disabled I found them dreary, cumbersome and depressing. While design has gotten much better, in 2000 the mentality of design for adaptive devices and durable medical goods was an afterthought. I could never understand how unfair and bleak of a selection us disabled have.

As a design student and new to the disabled world I soon realized people who have to live in a chair or the like want and deserve design in a world not built for us. What I saw was a disrespected market with offered items possessing little to no thought in form, design, colors and innovation. As a disabled person it’s easy to feel like an afterthought to the world, as if we are void of desire. It’s true we often feel like objects of care thrown into optionless utilitarian design. Dismayed by the lack of imagination of durable medical design, I even focused one of my freshmen studios redesigning a wheelchair. I stated that people with disabilities is an overlooked and growing market with global purchasing power. And, it’s true. The market is huge and growing.

According to the World Bank, one billion people experience some form of disability with one-fifth experiencing significant disabilities. People with disabilities are the largest minority sect, yet the world’s fastest-growing minority. Today, I see an industry who is at least trying to make products look better as they realize, disabled or not, we live in an era of design and people, even disabled, expect it.

It’s fulfilling to be a part of Design with the 90%. I like the idea of what I do bringing meaning to others and while I still love high design and still swoon over seemingly simple design, minimal cutlines and beautiful forms whether in cars, furniture or tech, I’ve entered the phase of my design career where I want what I contribute to the world to be meaningful and even possibly change lives. I don’t necessarily want to be a part of helping to design mass consumerism for consumerism sake anymore. I still freelance designer for product and toy companies, but my heart belongs to designing for good and intrinsic benefit. This includes sharing my story through art.

While in college I heard of Design with the 90% and was a great admirer of simple products like Lifestraw and Qdrum. Both these products involve greater accessibility to clean water as half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne diseases, and more than 6,000 people, mainly children, die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water or lack of access.

There are a lot of vulnerable people who need help in this world and it’s important to understand that not all struggle and class  position is earned nor deserved. Strife, like the wind, can enter any one of our lives.

Look at me. I did everything “right”. I’ve been working since I was 13 years old, paid for my own cars and insurance since I was 16, put myself through 7 years of college and worked hard. But it didn’t matter. I still had a genetic disorder that I would discover in my early twenties, and it change my life forever. I’m fortunate to be in the position I am, but not everyone is and fortune doesn’t apways last forever. Medical expenses is the number one reason for bankruptcy in the US. It’s expensive to be sick and disabled and anyone is subjected to financial ruins when stricken with ill health.

It’s important to understand that people in poverty, whether in the US or abroad, aren’t all categorically lazy people. Struggle and strife deals out its sentence like the wind and many find themselves in circumstances not of their own doing. It’s not so simple as saying “that person didn’t pull their boot straps up.”

Many are born into generational poverty and did nothing to earn that, much like generational wealth is bestowed on those who did nothing to neccessarily earn it. Success isn’t always earned nor deserved.

Many impoverished individuals, impoverished cities or countries are victims of explotation by their governmenment or upper class. For example, Flint. America’s poorest city whom due to government exploitation have been living with diseased water for over 5 years. These families now live with life-long diseases, psychological and neurological conditions, cancer, generational diseases due to dirty water and even death. The US is the world’s richest nation in the world and yet 50% of Americans are in or near poverty and it’s rising. If you’re already poor is really hard to climb out when your leaders exploit you.

And then there is the long-lasting effects of war. As Americans we live in a bubble when it comes to war. We don’t experience daily war but many people throughout the world live in war torn area with bombs daily raining down on them, and the innocent civilians did nothing to deserve it. War has lasting affects for decades and even genetically felt through generations. Our bombings have left millions and millions of active landmines around the world which contribute to the worldwide amputee community. Children are still getting blown up by US landmines in Laos from Vietnam.

The chemicals we employ in war, like US’ Agent Orange in the Vietnam war, creates generational effects. For example, between 1964 and 1973 US secretly dropped 2 million tons of explosives over Laos. 80 million unexploded bombs have been living in Laos soil since and these mines are still claiming dozens and dozens of lives every year. Agent Orange is dioxin — now regarded as one of the most toxic chemicals known to man causing cancer, ungodly birth defects, life-long debilitation or disability, autoimmune diseases like Parkinson’s, neurological and psychological effects and death. Babies in Vietnam are still being born with birth defects. Agent Orange even rewrites genetic makeup for generations to come causing future generations to feel the affects of war with debilitating diseases and disability. Research suggests 12 generations will have to pass before dioxin stops affecting the genetic code.

 “Eighty percent of persons with disabilities live in developing countries, according to the UN Development Program (UNDP). The World Bank estimates that 20 per cent of the world's poorest people have some kind of disability.

Ninety percent of children with disabilities in developing countries do not attend school, says UNESCO. Disability rates in the population are higher among groups with lower educational level.

Poor people are more at risk of acquiring a disability because of lack of access to good nutrition, health care, sanitation, as well as safe living and working conditions. Once this occurs, people face barriers to the education and employment system.”

For these reasons and more, companies like D-Rev and accessible products like ReMotion Knee are important. Regardless of class or position in life, disabled people around the world deserve to know they are not an after thought in the design community.  We all have the potential to become disabled or ill and we all have the potential to fall on hard times. While we can’t change the entire world, we can find areas that we are passionate about, understand or have experience in and offer our time and services to make a difference.

We had planned to go to Seattle for the opening but we just got back from Michigan and we’ve been laid off so decided not to. If you’re in Seattle check out the exhibit :).

And if you’re interested in supporting ReMotion Knee, D-Rev is a nonprofit and relies on the support of the community to continue their work. http://d-rev.org

My art gallery

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