Scott Summit argues that prosthetic limbs should be custom-made sculptures reflecting each person's identity, not mass-produced mechanical devices. He proposes using a camera and laptop to scan, model, and distribute personalized prostheses globally, making them beautiful and sensual to reduce stigma around amputation.
Chapters
I think one of the problems is that we have this mentality, this form follows function mentality. And it's kind of a bastardization of what was once said 100 years ago by Louis Sullivan. And it's come to mean that form follows mechanical function. And so we've now come to accept that this is a mantra handed down by Louis Sullivan, which gives us free reign of creating something that's clunky and mechanical and utilitarian, instead of something that really has form and beauty to it sometimes when it's needed. So when you're talking about form follows function in the amputee world, it usually stops at about this point. Form follows mechanical function. Get somebody walking. But that also overlooks the complexity of humans, that we're a little more nuanced than that, that the body is not simply something that keeps the head from falling on the ground. It's something that we adorn, we wrap, we cover with jewelry, we tattoo. It's so much more nuanced than simply a mechanical solution can allow. So when you're thinking about a prosthetic in that aspect, the idea of function, what does a function offer? It's much, much broader. Well, the challenge, though, with prosthetic limbs really has a lot to do with the mechanical nature of them. Because in this case, you're talking about something that has to be mass produced. And a lot of the artifacts from mass production are always going to get in the way because this is what you have to associate with mass production. It's one size fits all. It's inherently impersonal, it's inherently mechanical. There's nothing individualized about it. That's just the nature of mass production. It's the way it works. So that's one of the reasons such an odd juxtaposition against the human body, which is inherently mass customized, it's unique, it's emotive, it's expressive. So what I set out to do a number of years ago was actually to look at how one might change this, how you might evolve a prosthetic leg if you threw out some of the basic tenets that guided its evolution to this point. And so what I came up with was, okay, well, if you're going to do that, you have to create something that is really created by the person and for the person and of them, and something that's as unique as their fingerprint. And it has to be as fluid lined as possible. It has to be as sensual and sculptural, and it has to represent their personality as well as their physicality, if you're really going to do something that is a part of that person. So then I got a little bit more elaborate and said, okay, what I wanted to be able to do is drop down into Jordan or Cambodia or Laos, you name it, with nothing more than a camera and a laptop and access to the Internet and scan somebody, capture their data, come up with a solution and have that solution ready to go and let it go viral so that legs can propagate all over the world, solve problems. That's the kind of utopian vision that you set out for one of these things for. Decided also, if it was beautifully sculpted and crafted, it would change some of the stigma associated with prosthetic limbs. It would change the way the person actually perceives their own body. And hopefully it would actually change then the way society sees prosthetic limbs and amputees in general. It's a lot worse in the US or it's a lot worse in the rest of the world. There are many places where an amputee is a real social stigma. It stops somebody from getting a job, from getting married, all kinds of things. So it's a fairly meaningful thing to start altering the perception that we have. The idea is that if you can change something from utilitarian to sculptural and beautiful, maybe you change the dialogue that goes on, maybe change the perception. It had to give somebody their symmetry back, but not in a way that's mimicking or emulating a human, because that takes us into this area we call the uncanny valley. Something that is uncomfortably human, but not human. So the idea is to create something that's beautiful, that suggests the person that is unique, but doesn't try to be something it's not, that's as honest as it can possibly be.
