 Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be here. I was given only five minutes, so I'm going to be very brief. Ever since I became a chair of industrial design at Pratt, I was determined to reach out to Copper Hewitt Museum. I believe that students of industrial design should partake in the largest industry in New York City, which is culture. And museums, great representatives of culture in New York. I wanted students, however, to see the museum not only as a resource center, but as a catalyst, as a place for creating new work, for expressing their creativity. And it was fortunate that the director of Copper Hewitt, Caroline Baumann, was very, very receptive to my ideas. About a year ago, we started this collaboration. We were very lucky that at the time, museum was working on the show by the people, which deals with so many preoccupations, which we address at our design work at the department. And this is how we met with Cynthia Smith, the curator who reviewed and guided students' projects throughout this rather long semester-long process. And we were double lucky to get to know caring kind, which took such good care of our students, providing them with opportunity to work with real people and real patients in solving some very real problems of today's health care. In conclusion, I wanted to say that this evening is by no means a concluding event. We continue our collaboration, as we speak this semester, with new groups of students. And we look forward to producing new work and new projects under the guidance of Copper Hewitt curators. So with this, I'd like to now present Louie Ellen Barkin to the podium. Thank you very much. Thank you, Pamela. Thank you, Constantine, for the opportunity to add caring kind's voice to this wonderful project. There we go. We all have strengths. Many of you may know us as the former New York City chapter of the Alzheimer's Association. On December 1st, 2015, we changed our name to caring kind to reflect our over 30 years of experience, providing programs and services and resources for individuals and families affected by dementia diagnosis. Today, as the baby boomers enter the greatest risk for dementia, the age of greatest risk for dementia, caring kind has never been more in demand. Our clients need social work services, education and training, support groups, a wanderer safety program and referrals to home health aids. And they can access all of these programs and services and more all free, simply by calling us. And after many years of talking to our families, we know that we will also need products to provide comfort, protection and efficiency for caregivers who are doing one of the hardest imaginable jobs. So how lucky are we to live in New York City, and we say that every day, where the creative and compassionate professor, Alex Waiter, decided to give this challenge to his design students and called on caring kind's professional staff and our clients to add their life experience and their perspective to the work. For the past 18 months, we have watched with pride and wonder, as Alex's students took on the challenge and developed products that can really change life. What started as a pilot and experiment and creative thinking and design has produced a stream of fantastic products, which we hope to exhibit, produce and bring to market. And make no mistake, the market for these products is growing exponentially every year. We say that in the absence of an effective therapy, the best therapy is good care. And good care includes products that make life easier for both the caregiver and the person with dementia. By the spring, Pratt and caring kind will have given birth to over 20 new designs and seven more on the way. Our plan is to select some for exhibition and production. And we will be proud of both. But the day that I really look forward to is the day that I read the first letter from a client, thanking us for making life more manageable and more comfortable. And I truly hope that you will all be here on the day that I read that letter. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. My name is Cody Kalmaio and I'm an industrial design graduate student at Pratt. And my name is Erin Green and I'm also an industrial design graduate student. And we are so happy to be here to present these products that we and our peers have been designing for caring kind and for people with Alzheimer's. So this is the reality that we live in. Five million Americans have Alzheimer's. And because each person with Alzheimer's has up to four caregivers, the disease directly impacts at least 20 million people in this country. And as Luan said, these numbers are only projected to increase as baby boomers age. And as we approach this design problem, we wanted to keep in mind the three different phases of Alzheimer's, early, middle and late. And one thing I didn't know before I started this project was that with Alzheimer's, your brain actually physically shrinks. It's not just the losing of your memory. So we're going to discuss these phases a little bit more as we present our designs. But these were the three stages that we were designing for. So we began by consulting experts at caring kind as well as family members and family caregivers and professional caregivers to understand behaviors of people with Alzheimer's. Common behaviors include sleepiness, sleepiness, wandering, agitation, anxiety and aggression, which varies as the disease progresses. And we'll discuss more specific behaviors along with the products that pertain to that behavior. So after working with caring kind and learning more, we came up with some overall design mandates that each of us tried to apply to our products while keeping in mind the individual problem we were trying to solve. And one of the biggest ones was attaching new behaviors to ingrained habits. So understanding how a person is living and what the issues are and reattaching new behaviors to them. We also want to ease the role of the caretaker and family member while maintaining dignity. And something that's very important is multiplying moments of joy. We're dealing with people who are, this is their family. This is their loved ones. And we want to be able to contain joy in those relationships. And all the while we wanted to understand that or keep in mind that designers bring assumptions and preconceptions into any situation. And so it's important to have conversations and do research that reveal those assumptions and allow us to enter that situation with a clear outlook. So now we want to show you some of our products developed over the past two semesters. So the first one, and we're dealing in order of the presentation with their starting in the early phase. This is a hidden kitchen. So it is a sliding stove top cover that can cover the stove and then also move aside to allow the stove to be used. One of the things I love about this project is it allows a person with Alzheimer's and other family members to coexist in the same space and use something for two different purposes. This also has a hidden drawer compartment that allows things like knives to be hidden out of sight and just keep everything a little bit safer. So this is my project. It's a clothing organizer. So one thing I noticed was that one of the problems that people with Alzheimer's face is that they might not remember to change their clothes or they might not want to change their clothes or they might forget which clothes are clean. So I looked for similar habits that people already employ in their daily lives to organize what they have and haven't done. So I came across the pill box. So I decided to use that as an allegory for this project. So you fill each compartment. There are seven, one for each day. And these compartments fold away as you use your clothes for the week. And this helps the caregivers and the person with Alzheimer's to prepare outfits for the week ahead of time and to ease the burden of decision making in the mornings. And these two products deal with hobbies. So in the early phase, the person affected with Alzheimer's can still maintain a lot of the normal behaviors. So the first is a portable garden that eases some of the bending over involved in gardening, allows all your tools to be right at hand and eases with accessibility. And the next one is for a person who enjoys making a cocktail at home. It's a color-coded cocktail organizing set complete with color-coded tumblers and it attaches to a magnetic tray. So both these are great in helping you maintain your hobbies. Now we're transitioning into the middle phase of Alzheimer's, which is generally associated with loss of language ability. So this is a game called Conversation Dice that gives, it's a game for a person with Alzheimer's and their caretaker to play together. So you roll the dice and it uses symbols to start the kickstart conversation. So this can be both a trigger for past memories and also a way to come up with new conversations that can be a little silly sometimes. Maybe you want to start a conversation that has to do with clouds and wine at the same time. Why not? So also in the middle phase, this is where you may need to start making some modifications to your home. And this project addresses not being able to find certain objects. So this is a series of Velcro wall tiles that can just adhere right on top of your existing wall and it pairs with Velcro strips that you can attach to the back of objects such as the remote. So the remote can just be stuck right next to your favorite chair while you're watching TV and it doesn't have to be a question or a discussion every day on where the remote was or if it was moved. So it's all about adding some more accessibility. And this is a clock that indicates whether it's day or night outside. So when the moon shape disappears, the sun appears. And so people in the middle stage often don't comprehend what the numbers on the clock mean. So this gives them an easily recognizable symbol that can help them align their internal world with the external. And this is my project. So the behavior that I was looking at was wandering. And in the late phase, the person with Alzheimer's may suddenly have an urge or a memory. They may think that they're younger than they really are and they need to go to school or something like that. And wandering is one of the biggest challenges presented in this phase. So I wanted to design a product that discouraged people from leaving while not preventing them. It's illegal to lock somebody in their home. So this is made entirely of paper. And when it is being stored, it's completely flat. It can attach to the back of the door. And each shelf pops down, revealing this three-dimensional photo frame that you can completely customize with family photos or reminders and notes. So it just encourages the person to get lost in a world and forget why they were even trying to leave in the first place. And last but not least, we have the photo mirror. So people with Alzheimer's can often be startled by their own appearance in a mirror because their self-image sometimes doesn't align with the reflection that they see. So they might, for example, imagine themselves being younger than the image that's reflected. So this project intervenes in the form of a bathroom mirror and uses a two-way mirror that becomes a customizable photo display when lit from behind. And this allows caretakers and people with Alzheimer's to share a space. And those are our projects. Thank you so much. Good evening. My name is Megan Leidy, and I'm a senior at the Industrial Design Program at Pratt Institute. Hi, my name is Jerry. I am a junior. So both of our classes spend the semester working with the idea of homelessness and the hungry, more specifically working with the organization CHIPS. Today we are presenting on behalf of our fellow classmates and introducing many of the projects worked on in the past year. CHIPS is the Park Slope community help. The nonprofit organization runs two operations upstairs as a woman's shelter for prenatal and postpartum homeless women and downstairs as a soup kitchen and food pantry available to a diverse population. CHIPS operates to assist the growing hungry and homeless population of New York City where the average age of homelessness is only nine years old and over 62,000 homeless sleep in shelters every night. The cause of the housing and food insecurity epidemic is often misinterpreted as an individual attribute where the root of the problem lies in the structural issues such as lack of affordable housing. These issues are ongoing and continually growing which is why it is so important for us as a society to recognize them. So CHIPS runs with the help of volunteers and the Park Slope community and its dedicated staff amongst whom are Janice, the director of food services, Denise, the executive director and Sharon, the director of shelter services. CHIPS receives nearly 80% of his donated food from the Park Slope co-op and is heavily supported by its surrounding community. Beyond our online research as a class on homelessness students in our class actively volunteered with CHIPS to better understand the scope of the issue. To form a sense of empathy we spent time getting to know the organization, the volunteers and the displaced population. From our findings we created storyboards and word maps to help identify key issues. These findings inspired our class to design a variety of systems, services and products and we've broken these down into four different categories, rest, identity, hygiene and opportunity. So first we have a rest. Curie constructed the in-life tent project which builds communities by providing housing for the homeless population. The distribution of the portable tents give the homeless the push they need to get their first steps back on track. For the goal of the project it's not only to offer housing but the opportunity to connect with others and build relationships. Next we have a program called Perch created by Aditi. She discovered that there is no existing assigned space for people to rest in the city. Aside from safety and theft concerns most public benches have spikes or arm rests between the seats therefore preventing people from lying across. Perch would be parked outside dropping centers and provide the homeless a safe cozy and warm environment to relax and recover. Chris designed the garden a community housing concept that includes modular and sustainable micro homes which sloped with sloped rooftop gardens. It allows members of the homeless community to find refuge and safety in a comfortable environment while cultivating crops for personal consumption and selling at local markets. We have two projects that approach the issue of identity within homelessness. Here we have a writing program designed by Jisoo for the homeless. This project helps increase awareness to readers and participants without requiring any special skills or funds from the participants. The participants can then express their stories in any form text doodles origami and so on. Once published the completed books are available for sale or distribution. The authorship and fee and sales are sent to the writers or donated to support the participating organization. We have Andy who designed Voi. Voi is a sticker with a voice of an individual who's usually voiceless and homeless. Voi welcomes them to our shared community increases our awareness towards the homeless and strengthens our cohesion. And on to hygiene. So this is my project volunteering at Chip's soup kitchen allowed me to gain valuable first hand experience with difficulties that the homeless has to deal with on a daily basis. Public showers in New York City require expensive entry fees while a valid ID is mandatory for access for homeless shelters. Much of the population at Chip's lack access to both. Therefore they wear new clothes every day found at various soup kitchens and shelters. With that in mind I designed Mira a mobile shower unit that is essentially a retrofitted six by 12 foot trailer. Within the unit there is ample space for two showers and a changing room. Composed of color stainless steel and natural wood its interior not only allows for easy cleaning but also a safe and inviting personal space for the displays to shower in comfort. Improvement of personal hygiene can greatly strengthen self-esteem and restore hope to their lives. Next we have Heijun who designed Easy Wash which is a detachable outdoor wash fountain that connects to an existing water service line so that homeless community can wash their face hands and feet. And lastly we have Opportunity. Here Ryan designed DARS which is a donation system and vehicle that employs a given take reward bias so that donors are encouraged to donate and keep donating in the future while knowing exactly how their donations are helping others. Next we have Ayesha. Ayesha designed Kiosk which is an interactive job posting booth. Kiosk enables accessibility of different types of day labor opportunities to a population in need of extra money. Ordinary citizens can post jobs with the Kiosk app that will then be seen on the Kiosk on the street. An example could be someone moving furniture from one apartment to the other. Kiosk helps the population break free from the cycle of poverty by connecting ordinary citizens who need help with the population who can provide this help. Kiosk challenges the dialogue of who is in need of help and creates a symbiotic relationship between people in a community and an opportunity to discover and build skills. For my own project I focused on the idea of designing with chips. I spent most of the beginning observing and interacting with those at the organization and I left my process open ended in the beginning allowing my findings to determine whether I would design a product, a system or a service. I was drawn to chip strong connection with the Park Slope Food Co-op where they receive most of their food donations. However much of this food becomes scrap and then is thrown away. The connection from the co-op to chips felt incomplete, a cycle that needed to be further developed. I questioned then what would it look like if chips gave back to their community and continued this cycle. This question led me to community gardening as a therapeutic activity for the impoverished and where one could engage with their community. I mapped out potential collaborations and interviewed members from the community like I've mapped out here such as community gardens and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. And so my final design is called grassroots. It is a job training program connecting the chips population with the community gardens allowing them to give back to their community and gain needed skills such as composting or landscaping for employment in the green collar sector. Certain jobs would include positions at the Botanical Gardens or Park Slope. Grassroots is designed to break the cycle of poverty and provide opportunities and connections with the community. This project opened my eyes to a new type of design. It inspired me to go back to the idea of waste and continue it. I have received a grant from the Pratt Center of Community Development to continue the project with chips and establish a compost program and to strengthen their connection with this surrounding community. We would like to thank our fellow teachers and advisors on this project, chips for their collaboration and the Coupier Hewitt for allowing us to present our projects today. Thank you. Seems to be advancing here. Just one second. Technical difficulties. See if it stays there. Nope. See if it stays there. Nope. Sure. Okay. Apologies everyone. Close your eyes. Yes. Thanks everybody. Somehow every slide got a feeling my thunder. Automation. We tested all of this earlier guys. So why is doing it now? It should work now. Okay. Hopefully. All right. Thanks so much. My name is Garrett Hurley. I'm a certified prostitist and orthotist and the Chief Innovations Officer and Co-Founder of Limb Innovations. I'm very honored to be here to address the two questions presented to the panel. First shown here in understanding the needs of the underserved community and how can we foster deep insight and promote creative thinking? So first I want to give a disclaimer that although I'm on this design panel, I'm actually not a designer by trade. I'm a prostitist but I am a designer at heart. Here I am at eight years old with my first prototype of a robot and I want to answer the questions presented to the panel through the context of the infinite socket and this begins with aiming at a specific area of focus and for me that was identifying prosthetics and then more specifically identifying the interface with the human body known as the prosthetic socket. I got very interested in where technology meets the human body and how it fits to the human body and I immersed myself within that field. I was trained here in the United States and worked for over a decade here and also worked abroad in countries like Haiti and India and Mexico and Nicaragua and I spent a lot of time listening to the users, asking questions and really getting to know the space here in the United States and abroad and I started to identify areas of opportunity and for my specific application I identified that making a prosthetic socket is a very labor intensive and iterative process or excuse me mold-based process. So I actually very much enjoyed the process of making a prosthetic limb and the hands-on process that went into it but it is a long process and it leaves the patient waiting and so it delays care so I identified that as a limiting factor. I also identified that prosthetic sockets were not adjustable and people with amputation like all of us have bodies that change with time and on a daily basis and these changes affect their fit and the interface with their technology and even though the prosthetic sockets that I could make were very beautiful and had value they couldn't adapt and change with the user and there were certain bells and whistles that were coming out that helped for some adjustability but at the core the structural frame was still limited in its adjustability. I also identified that the designs of the prosthetic sockets didn't mimic anatomy in the way that I thought they could they're generally made with one to three types of plastics and these are hard plastics and our our body is not hard and it varies in material properties a lot and furthermore I also identified that fields like athletic apparel and shoe industry were utilizing advanced manufacturing and advanced processing and advanced materials that were not being utilized in the prosthetic industry that's largely due to the fact that the prosthetic sockets need to be custom molded and yet there's also this great opportunity to leverage some of this new technology so I began to organize the results and more importantly organized a team and my co-founder and I started with the small team shown here on the left of just four people and then we've grown into the larger team on the right here and I can't emphasize enough how important the team has been throughout the process and I wouldn't be here on this podium if it wasn't for the team and the concepts and the initial work that I did in identifying some of the need was only the start and the team has really run with those concepts and really evolved it into much more than I could have done on my own and I certainly give all the credit to the entire team not just my efforts furthermore we needed a space to work out of and the tech shop provided a wonderful opportunity for us in San Francisco to utilize a shared space wherein we could keep overhead costs low and not need to invest in expensive machinery that would have accrued a lot of upfront costs and so it's been a great opportunity to work with the tech shop and also other partnerships that I'll show at the end were were key in getting us to start excuse me we also needed to open our mind we stayed focused on the needs that have been identified but we also opened our mind to all solutions that could meet those needs and that was a key aspect to creating something that was outside the box of what the prosthetic industry had already been doing so we started iterating and you got to start somewhere right this is obviously a very rough prototype but we learned from it and yes we continued to iterate and we tested our assumptions with the users and we measured the results and continued to reiterate we not only iterated on the product itself but on the manufacturing and distribution and that's one thing that I would encourage young designers to consider is that it's not only the product that will make an impact or will not determine whether or not your product can help people but also the business plan and the distribution model that is integrated into that as well so that shouldn't be overlooked eventually we were able to launch the infinite socket transfemoral product shown on the left and then the later the infinite trans tibial product on the right and the transfemoral product has both products have many attributes to show you a few on the transfemoral product there's user adjustability with modular closure systems they can tighten and loosen the fit of their prosthetic socket excuse me and then the uh issue seat can raise and lower to meet the the fit needs of the patient the brim of the prosthetic socket can raise and lower depending on the comfort that they desire and the amount of support that they need and the structural struts of the frame can move in and out as well as pivot side to side and these attributes and features were not just arbitrarily created they were created based on intense testing and verification through validating our assumptions through validated learning now we have hundreds of users utilizing our prosthetic sockets throughout the nation and just starting in internationally and this is really what motivates us and drives us it's the the users out there doing amazing things and we continue to hear wonderful stories of how people's lives are impacted by what we're doing and that's really what keeps us going but we don't stop there we continue to measure the results and here we can see that in a cohort of 75 patients we have a statistically significant improvement of the socket comfort score 101 percent improvement in that score compared to conventional prosthetic sockets that were used prior we also are measured measuring the materials and comparing those materials to other prosthetic sockets and also comparing it to anatomy continuing the validated learning and I hope this learning never stops and indeed it hasn't and I have no doubt that it will not continue because you know it's very hard trying to mimic the human body so we continue to find areas of improvement so the points that I've addressed here are shown in the bottom and they can be likened to what's found in user-centered design concepts and lean startup concepts and it's an iterative process and just to compare to some of those concepts that are already out there and some of the great work that's done there I feel like I'm emphasizing the immersion aspect and the identification of the needs as well as opening up to solutions that are outside the box of what's previously been done I want to give thanks and credit to so many people and so many organizations but here's just a few that I can name so thanks so much for your time and the audience here thank you hi I'm Cynthia Smith I'm curator by the people designing a Better America exhibition as Pam noted it is on the third floor and closes February 26th so if you haven't seen it please please go see it really really wonderful inspiring work is included I just wanted to thank all of you for sharing your for quite a range of human-centered design approaches and I think tonight should prove to be a quite a dynamic conversation between a professional innovator and with years of experience and students who are interested in designing and collaboration with underserved communities so very excited about this conversation so empathy a number of you talked about that Garrett Aaron Cody Jerry and Megan why is empathy an important skill for a designer and how and when do you employ it in the design process maybe you can we can go around and you can give me some examples of how it might have helped you develop the ideas or designs and I think this will be interesting because some of you are presenting a group so feel free to take from whatever you worked on or if it comes to mind when you were part of your studio you can bring those up so maybe we'll start right here I think empathy is tremendously important in product design we're giving real products that people hold in their hands and are going to interact with every day and additionally have to have empathy for the environment and for people who manufacture the product so empathy is something you always built from the ground up in my product I was dealing with preventing a wandering behavior for somebody with late stays Alzheimer's and that definitely requires a lot of empathy because without it's hard to actually picture what that person's truly going through so you have to absorb their situation learn and I really wanted the product to be something that could be adaptable so in creating kind of an open design that the person and their caretakers and families could adapt to the use you're having empathy for the entire realm around the product so yeah so for me I come from a theater background and so one of the allegories I guess I drew upon when I started thinking about designing for people with Alzheimer's is okay if I were an actor assuming a role I need to read my script I need to get my head inside that character and that's that was sort of like the guiding metaphor that I took in approaching designing with empathy I think to do a character justice you need to understand you know their behavior that might not be so obvious on the service level like maybe you know it goes beyond the script you imagine their daily life and then you might play that out on your own like some some actors are method actors they they play out the exact roles that their characters would do in order to feel like they are their character so you know I did a clothing organizer so I tried reassessing okay how how do I do this myself how do I assume other people do this in their daily lives and then what's the disjuncture between those habits was this something that in your conversations it came up that this was something that yeah this is actually a conversation that I had with my teacher Alex sweater who deals with this issue personally and and so it built off of those conversations yeah and for me the project that I worked on with chips definitely opened my eyes like I said to a new kind of design philosophy and new design process such as human-centered design which is very much a part of designing for empathy in which we look towards our users and the communities we're designing for and design with them which means treating them as our experts and that's something that I learned a lot through the project with chips I kept my mind very open and allowed them to be my expert and them to be my research and have them fuel the fire for the direction of my project which before I have never done a system or a service I had been strictly product design and so I allowed myself to keep that open mind and basically I ended up designing a system which was very different but has even changed how I view design now so and for mine for me volunteering at chips you really learned that everyone has their own story and designing for them you really have to not only step in their shoes but try to just comprehend the experiences they're going through and designing for the homeless they really have amazing stories and to take away from that it's for my project for the shower project it really didn't occur to me just how much they struggled with it I thought there would be something for homeless to to shower in the public but just putting yourself in their shoes imagining that if you were out on the street or if you didn't have suddenly you didn't have a home because of a raising rent how do you deal with it how do you yeah so this has been giving me a constant reflection for every step of my project every prototyping and I always go back to chips and talk with people just to confirm that doing the right thing here well it's interesting you talk about story we had another public program the other day with a group out of Detroit and the woman who was inspired to start the social enterprise was from meeting people from a women's homeless shelter and hearing their resilient stories so it this this kind of thread of humanity and what you're talking about understanding people's stories and and kind of embodying that seems to be consistent so it's very interesting you're not an industrial designer but you act like an industrial designer in many ways so you're our honorary ID person tonight you also were working directly with people and you know kind of sculpting or can you talk more about that initial experience and how it translated yeah absolutely I'll answer that in the context of the previous question about empathy as well which is I think hugely important in any design and you know from my design similar to the designs for homelessness and for Alzheimer's you can't necessarily fully put yourself into that position I couldn't fully become an amputee but part of the reason why I wanted to emphasize immersion is because just being with amputees like serving their needs for so long really helped me to understand their needs and so I would say that for me a huge aspect to what I've been able to do is attributed to the years of work of actually working with these people and knowing their needs very intimately so so systems I'm going to focus on chips because you guys really for this next set of questions you really thought about systems and developed a variety of systemic innovations and I think also what infinite socket is it's a complete system of delivery and manufacturing and I want you to kind of explain that more to our audience and have really been at the forefront of this kind of mass what do they call it mass production customization mass customization why do you think it's important to address the entire system in the designs that came out of chips and also with infinite socket whoever wants to go first um I guess I would answer that in the sense that like seeing a design or a project as an entire system is important because there are always so many moving parts and like in the world in society things are constantly changing so when you have when you step back and take all the stakeholders within that system I think it's important to them think about that and how they change as like a whole unit and it's definitely difficult to change from the mindset of thinking about a product to a broader system because there are so many moving parts and as Garrett was saying like the immersion and being able to work with amputees for years I think that's something I struggled with as a student having one semester for a project we weren't able to immerse ourselves as much as I would like to just because we have deadlines but I know like for my project it was very important for me to spend most of my time going to chips and just observing the systems and sort of the connections chips has with their broader community so as far as a system why I think it's really important to address the full system is I'll have to use a cliche and say that you're only as strong as your weakest link and we certainly found that to be true of our prosthetic systems you know we continue to iterate and improve our prosthetic systems and the more we improve new weak links are revealed and so I would say that you know the the most limiting factors will continue to step front and that's that's what we continue to improve upon and as I said I don't think it's ever going to end there's a great opportunity to continue to improve prosthetic sockets yeah just just to people just to remind people that what infinite socket was it's a custom molded prosthetic socket this is where the prosthetic connects to the human body and it's designed with modular easy to exchange components that adjust to the ever-changing human body I learned this I didn't realize if you think about it the body gains water loses water ages changes over time and so vastly I mean vastly improves the comfort level for people I mean it's like a game changer in this industry if I'm not if I understand I'm not a expert in prosthetics but it really is yeah there's there's never before been a modular socket system so that was sort of if there was an aha moment in the development it was when I realized that in order to there there's these conflicting needs where each prosthetic socket needs to be custom for the individual because all of our bodies are so different and moreover amputations are all different so there's the need for it to be customized and yet in order to bring in modern manufacturing and modern materials a lot of that is based out of out of production level manufacturing and and as usually or as often duplicative or excuse me advanced manufacturing is often conveyor belt style where it's each product is the same our product is different the modular solution allows for a lot of the components to be mass produced or manufactured but then our our struts our frame is custom molded by we created a manufacturing process where we have a renewable mold machine it's it's it's an actuated surface that changes based on the computer input for that custom person and is molded to that custom person but the parts that make up the socket can be mass produced so it's sort of this combo of mass produced parts but then they're customizable so it gets into that that mass customization aspect so both limb innovations and caring kind teams design iteration was employed can you tell me more about why this method prototyping testing and refining the design a whole multitude of times is helpful and while you were limited with the number of iterations simply by the length of the school semester what were one or two key insights that you all discovered along the way yeah iterating as a student is very important and one of the biggest things I've learned in my time at Pratt is you're going to have some failures along the way and it's important to just fail faster so to take every failure and learn from it and then move on and in my project I was making a shelf that needed to be structural but also made out of paper so I had to do a lot of experiments with finding enough strength to keep essentially what's a giant pop-up card upright and sturdy while also having it have a mechanical component so iterating is definitely important and it only strengthens the product's success if it were to eventually come to market as as we hope to do with some of these one thing I'm learning as a designer is to really reframe the idea of a prototype as a question rather than as an answer and if a prototype is a physical embodiment of a question that you want to present to someone you have to think about how you ask that question whether you're asking too many questions at once is it a good question is it a question worth asking so that's what I think about prototyping I have to say this was the joy of partnering with Pratt every student I met was brilliant every student I mean here they are so Gary you talked a little bit about tech shop for those of you who don't know about tech shop they're all over the United States you can be a member of tech shop they're kind of these hacker spaces that allow people our research and development traditionally is done behind closed doors and companies but as you know that landscape is changing rapidly and so it really allows anybody to kind of start up and become a start a business and you can easily do a lot of rapid prototyping and how important was it to have a space like this and the reason we're talking about tech shop is that's kind of I included tech shop in the exhibition and included a couple projects that came out of tech shop one being infinite talk and the other one this kicker helper which was for people who are in wheelchairs kids students who a teacher was trying to help them kick a ball because they couldn't kick a ball and they prototyped it at tech shop but all these amazing products are coming out of this this kind of democratic r&d space how important was it for you to to engage there yeah it was hugely important for the reasons I mentioned in my section of the talk it was hugely important to keep overhead low and have access to these great machines but even above and beyond this something that you touched on a little bit is how many other people doing amazing things are in the space and so it's really inspiring and you learn a lot from working with these other designers and other people and I certainly had that experience where you know we were working on our project but there was all kinds of really amazing people and and products being worked on around us and so that just helped incubate our ideas and just helped us evolve and I must say if anybody wants to jump in I've kind of thought about each one of the groups but if any of you want to jump in at any time please feel free to do so so I think the statistics speak for themselves there are two million amputees in the United States 40 million worldwide five million people are living with Alzheimer's and another 20 million are caregivers here in the US alone 15 million households are food insecure and a half a million people are homeless in the United States this is a question to all of you as you developed your designs did you think about how how they might scale up to serve a larger population and did this affect the design and if it did how so anyone I can start on this and this time I'll take the brunt of this time so yes scalability certainly a huge aspect to the design I think part of the motivation of creating a different way to skin a cat was seeing that there was limitations in the way that prosthetic sockets are made in that they're not able to scale to a way that can incorporate some some other opportunities such as materials and machinery and so yes it was integral from the beginning and like design products they continue to evolve and same thing with the manufacturing process it continues to evolve so while certainly scalability has been considered since the beginning it's it's not like that's something we just checked off and said okay we got scalability it's just a continued process of improving our our manufacturability and be able to scale it well I think what's impressive from from this group is it sounds like caring kind is going to begin to produce some of these looking to produce some of these and also you've already received a grant to further expand your efforts maybe you can all talk about kind of where those are and talk a little bit more about those yeah definitely having it out there that these could potentially be made was very good to keep in mind from the beginning of the design process which is why for mine I was looking at basically just one material making the whole thing out of paper and what's interesting about approaching designing for Alzheimer's is because you're dealing with designing somebody who is slowly losing their mind is the the simpler the product actually the more successful it often is which is great when thinking about potentially manufacturing things so we didn't look at things that had a lot of technology almost nothing we presented today short of maybe the clock you know had some basic technology in it everything was very analog very customizable we were trying to keep all of our designs under a hundred dollars so scaling up was definitely a big part of the design process from the beginning I think hand in hand with scalability is accessibility we were so under a hundred dollars you know as these things grow we have to keep in mind that you know this has to be accessible to everyone and you know sometimes mass customization can have a price tag associated with it so we have to sort of balance those issues and for my project with chips which I took it last spring but it inspired me to continue it and so I applied for a grant through a center we have at Pratt and I've been working continually with chips for the past what's the name of the center Pratt Center for community development which has been around for it's one of the longest centers for community development in the country I think yeah yeah um so they offer a fellowship program basically and I thought I would try and apply for it and I received the grant which was very exciting and I've been able just the past half year that I've started the project to get to know chips better as an organization and I've taken inspiration from my initial concept and honed in on the idea of establishing a compost program within the kitchen that would be received by community gardens in the area or through the New York City organics collection and I will say it's very different to be working on our actual project now rather than a concept and thinking about systems and all of the moving parts I have already failed a lot failed early and often um but I have learned a lot as well through the process and I want to add to certainly for my project for the shower program since the beginning of the semester we've been in conversation with chips and they actually they were the ones who first suggested a need for this shower program that they were already in contact with someone to to realize this project but we took we took it more from the design side I guess more prototyping and more speaking with the population directly there is there is word that it might continue in the future but for now my entire design process is personally geared towards having this shower program outfitted at chips so all the technical issues I've run into how to get the water running or the costs material use that's all for personalized towards chips I've actually gone outside to the building and like measured all the sidewalks and stuff in my process it's interesting because one of the projects in design by the people is Fresh Moves a mobile market out of Chicago when they retrofitted old city buses so maybe there's a way to retrofit I don't think you need a city bus but maybe something smaller that exists yeah but I've actually done a research for like a market research of shower programs around the world of what people have been doing a lot of non-profit organizations are not popping up for specifically on shower programs for me as a semester project I couldn't go deeply into it but there's Lava May from I think from the west coast they've been they've been doing a lot of retrofitting buses trucks and trailers there's also a lot of programs I think we've heard on the social media shower to the shower for the people this guy took like a five thousand dollar box truck and converted into a shower program so there's a lot that have been popping up in the recent years that's great I think we're almost ready for our audience Q&A but I want to give a couple of closing remarks based on the wonderful conversation we've had so far all of these examples presented tonight point to how design whether it's triggering memory or empowering homeless women or improving mobility for amputees around the world improves people's lives Pratt prepares its students to become responsible professional designers ready to tackle a myriad of challenges confronting us in the 21st century and I think the work presented here tonight is evidence of that so I'll open it up to the audience are there any questions hi it was really hopeful and beautiful presentation I really I can't say it strongly enough inspiring and I have two questions actually in terms of your concepts that you're doing about pro with the showers and working with homeless does Pratt in any way work with how to get it into a system in terms of government or how do you make it real and put it on the street does that ever is that a teachable part of the process that's my first question my second question which is about prosthetics how does 3d printing with prosthetics compare to what you're doing I definitely agree with that that question trying to think of how these systems can become a reality and I think we have a new chair of industrial design that's been here with us like for a year and a half now and I do think our program is developing more towards that and thinking more so of the reality of design and how we present ourselves as designers in society and I think that means working with real issues in society and potentially working with more disciplines I think would help solve that problem too so we use 3d printing and we have used 3d printing and we continue to use it it's used in the base plate right now the the the end pad at the end of their residual limb is 3d printed and we used it a lot in prototyping we see 3d printing as a tool one of many manufacturing options and we utilize it when it's applicable and it'll continue to change and it'll get more applicable to certain aspects there are full prostheses that can be 3d printed but we see that is still somewhat limited in that you can 3d print a fixed cup if you will or fixed shape but it can't change with the residual limb and you can 3d print a designed socket that has built-in adjustability but the materials at scale are not fast enough and cheap enough to be able to compete with what we can do another thing to emphasize here is that these prostheses see a ton of load a ton of forces and so they they need to be very strong and I don't think I could ever emphasize that enough the engineers that I work with they I think they've really learned it when when stuff breaks you know and it's like I saw it a lot as a process seeing the feet that are made for amputees break so I knew the amount of forces that go into these and while I see great promise in 3d printing being able to integrate even more into our prosthetics socket systems it's part of the picture not the whole picture in my opinion hi everybody how you doing um great work great presentation really big fan of what's happening here at Cooper Hewitt I just want to tie in the the Pratt and industry and business side of things you know there's a huge amazing like product that you can design right and you can design it to the best but if you're not tied into what's happening like socioeconomically you're not going to be able to develop the process and this is more in addition to your question is at what point do you guys begin to talk about this as concept and then try to basically implement it in some kind of system how what kind of conversations are actually in the design room in the explorations space more importantly in the prototyping phase always connecting it back to the industry I'm fortunate to work for limb innovations one was our first employee actually and uh he is the designer by training and I've learned a lot of this from thank you thank you and the idea is like the more that you have those conversations initially the better informed your design becomes to be naturally marketable scalable and more importantly life-changing product so maybe you guys can talk about what Pratt does to basically build up that that side of the design process uh sure I mean I think that's an incredibly important like you said and one of the reasons why this partner this project was so great to be a part of was from day one we were working with experts we went to caring kind multiple times we talked to people who were training families and caregivers so it really was a a process that was well researched and that's definitely something that is driven home and a good thing about being a student is sometimes you have products that are very realistic and grounded and sometimes you get to dream and you get to think of things that haven't been done before and I think that's what's special about as a student being able to kind of work between those worlds because in the real world partnership and research and cost is incredibly important so I think that's one thing that Pratt does a good job in and I would I would kind of emphasize that I think that's what school is school has a lot to do with dreaming keeping the dreamers alive at the same time you can ground that but I do think keeping the dreamers alive thank you this is awesome good evening thank you so much for sharing your experiences products with us quick question actually you talked about design the whole process just wanted to understand and you didn't talk about was constraints I think you were kind of touching there and I was about to ask each one of you what were your constraints and how did you actually plan for that or design for that and a little more emphasis I wanted from you you talked about how do you prototype and that was really interesting how do you prototype for a question so can you just elaborate that because I missed it I really found that very interesting so needed a little more in elaboration and then the concerns thanks well I think sometimes prototypes can stay within the realm of the designer right we can stay in our in our classroom in our studio and we can sort of get isolated there I think reframing the prototype is something external is a way to start a conversation and I think that's what's valuable in the design process is to is to have your right your ideas you know to bounce your ideas off people and have your assumptions challenged that's what I was thinking speaking towards constraints I would say for me always a hard part of starting a project and exploring all of the ideas that I have I always want to solve these huge really broad in-depth issues such as homelessness which was very difficult to grasp my mind around and how do I even approach that how do I solve a solution for that but really it's difficult to pull yourself in and focus in on one specific thing keeping in mind that many times that thing that you design or system whatever it is can also benefit many more aspects within the system so like the project that I'm working on now is working to successfully divert the food scraps back into the cycle but also trying to establish a more solid connection with chips in their community yeah thank you for the question it's a really good question and I sort of lump the constraints aspect into knowing the needs but I'm glad you mentioned that because it in my mind the needs sort of create this framework with which you need to work within but there's often like you know a give and take with a lot of these these attributes of a given product or design and for example in in my company and in prosthetics there's a give and take with regards to the need for structural integrity like I talked about it needs to be strong so it's safe for people but yet strong often requires a certain amount of bulk or thickness and people don't want you know a big bulky thing so it's the sort of give and take and a solution for that is often okay well we can make it out of really expensive materials but if we make certain parts out of titanium it it gets to where it's it doesn't meet another constraint which is accessibility which is also mentioned so it's sort of working within these these different these different interrelated constraints they're often not mutually exclusive but rather interrelated and and I think it's just a process of finding the right happy medium where it's meeting the needs and the best way that it can and the second aspect of your question remind me was there was constraints and then there was the other aspect oh yeah you did mention the right I do think that that was a really good point that you made and I think designing for a question you asked about that and it made me think about how I've actually learned that a lot of design seems to be best approached as like a researcher as opposed to if you're like I'm the designer with the perfect solution it often doesn't end up working as well as if you approach it like a researcher where you make a hypothesis this is what I think will work you can still put yourself out there with what you think will be best but then being open to the fact that it might not be and open to the results like a researcher is because an appropriate researcher you know they don't alter the results based on what they want they're open to finding what is true and and so I would encourage young designers to learn a lot about research research design because I think that's a key aspect do we have time so I think we have time for one quick question mine mine's very quick um so the lessons learned in over 20 years of developing the prosthetic devices uh in terms of stability uh over here on the left I see a walker I'm familiar with that walker um and then in the middle your product um you've given a lot of thought to how to stabilize the body can we adapt what you've learned to what's on the left yeah thank you for the question I'm actually very excited about the many areas of opportunity to integrate what I've learned about fitting to the human body to other areas I see great opportunity not only in a prosthetic socket but in the chairs that we sit in in the cars that we drive in in where our body meets technology and so I do think that there's great opportunity for that and what I would also emphasize is that every need is different um each area is specific so really getting into well what is important about that walker boiling it down to like what are the key aspects that that product meets or what needs is it serving then you can start to strip away the things that are not needed or or uh infiltrate other new designs that maybe improve upon what's provided I think that's it thanks so much for coming