7 Jan 2022 · 3 min
Hugh Herr, a prosthesis user himself, designs better artificial limbs by testing them first. He's built prosthetics that let amputees dance ballet and armless musicians play Beethoven, and imagines a future where human bodies merge with technology to expand what counts as normal.
It's very powerful that I use prostheses myself. And on a few levels, that's important. One is I intimately am aware of the consequence of poor design. I've spent my life trying to work with bad design. And I know firsthand how devastating and painful it is to be— to trying to go about the world and you're surrounded by technology that's incredibly poor in its conception and design. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is I'm often the first human to test The technologies that are being conceived in my laboratory. I'm the first person to feel it, to experience it. Because I can feel it and I also know the physics and engineering in my head, I can really quickly find the bug and solve the bug. Where another person may know the science and the engineering but can't feel it, so doesn't come to the solution as quickly as I do. So that's an interesting advantage that I have. And regarding my passion, again, I know how painful it is to be in a world with design that doesn't work. So what really drives me and my passions and whatnot is the times in my life where I can put out into the world A fantastic design that improves people's lives. I would love to see a person with leg amputation dance ballet. I'd love to see a person with no arms play a Beethoven sonata at normal speeds, normal expressions. Longer term, I'd like to see a world where society doesn't have such a narrow view of human intelligence and human beauty, that we greatly expand human diversity and our notion of what's beautiful and what's intelligent greatly, greatly expands. Right now, society has a very narrow view of what a beautiful woman looks like and a beautiful man looks like. We have a very narrow view of what an intelligent person is. Imagine a world of where I hope we will be 50 to 100 years from now, where humans can express all kinds of shapes and morphologies and dynamics, all forms of thinking and expressing and feeling. As we blend our physiologies in with the built environment, we will have this greater capacity to express. And my hope is that will expand human diversity, not shrink human diversity, and fundamentally change our view of beauty and expression.
