What are they going on about? I showed this to my seven year old who is wheelchair bound and she asked me when she’s getting her robot legs. She’d absolutely love to have a crab leg chair that could get her up and down the stairs without having to transfer from her wheelchair to her stair lift. Move up and down a little so she could reach something out of a cabinet instead of having to ask big sister or mom and dad for help a hundred times a day.
You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?
The author says exactly that in the essay, that if they could get a crab chair tomorrow they would be the first in line.
His point is that these sorts of designs are never going to be practical and that he wishes they would put some of this energy into designing the practical next steps for mobility assistance, that focus on the things the community actually needs.
That’s the entire point though: to reach that design peak, you first gotta climb the mountain. What is the author’s proposition? We ought to skip a bunch of steps on the R&D ladder so he can get new products faster? This isn’t Samsung just vomiting phone designs hoping something will stick, this is far more important than that. Research is essential. Exploration is essential. Speculation is essential. Things like these take time and many iterations to perfect.
I think the author is understandably frustrated about seeing a lot of fanfare for sexy prototypes years or decades from the market, when he struggles every day with flaws in his actual mobility devices that could be improved in months if the manufacturers cared enough to do it.
The author is misguided in blaming the crab chair engineers for this state of affairs. The crab chair engineers aren't responsible for the myriad socioeconomic inefficiencies that make wheelchairs suck today. If they didn't work on crab chairs, they'd work on some other artsy project, and we still wouldn't have better wheelchairs. But everyone in this thread needs to chill out and stop being so personally offended that this writer is holding back human progress by not ass-kissing the crab chair.
We don't have to guess what the author's proposition is. He says it in the last few paragraphs:
> My concern, and the thing that saps any enthusiasm the sleek design might inspire in me, is that much like more traditional inspiration porn harms the disabled community by propagating false narratives and not doing justice to real experiences of disabled people, this engineering version of inspiration porn neglects to address the design problems most critical to our community while pulling away obviously-talented designers and chair-loads of cash that could have been focused on solving them.
> I would give at least a few of my quad fingers for a high quality, lightweight, low-profile indoor/outdoor power chair with the customizable seating and back options I rely on. Same for a stable shower chair that could safely navigate step-in showers. I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel(chair), but tweaking and refining the designs we have to optimize independence and function for users.
> Like I wrote in the previous article in this series, there are brilliant designers working on these and other similar issues but we need more! More minds, more money, more eyeballs focused on improving what we have and doing so in affordable ways.
> I genuinely appreciate the designers behind the “Walk me” (even if I wholeheartedly question whomever decided the name should sound like wheelchair users are the crabchair’s pets). I hope their experience designing the crabchair got them excited about disability-related design and that they continue to pursue it.
> All I ask is that instead of sitting in their corporate labs, bouncing ideas off each other, they get out into the real world. They should dedicate themselves to engaging and listening to the disability community about what problems need solving and what does and doesn’t work. We know. We get it.
wincy · · focus · HN ↗
You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?
cortesoft · · focus · HN ↗
His point is that these sorts of designs are never going to be practical and that he wishes they would put some of this energy into designing the practical next steps for mobility assistance, that focus on the things the community actually needs.
kddjjdjcjwnf · · focus · HN ↗
HedonicEscal8r · · focus · HN ↗
The author is misguided in blaming the crab chair engineers for this state of affairs. The crab chair engineers aren't responsible for the myriad socioeconomic inefficiencies that make wheelchairs suck today. If they didn't work on crab chairs, they'd work on some other artsy project, and we still wouldn't have better wheelchairs. But everyone in this thread needs to chill out and stop being so personally offended that this writer is holding back human progress by not ass-kissing the crab chair.
cortesoft · · focus · HN ↗
> My concern, and the thing that saps any enthusiasm the sleek design might inspire in me, is that much like more traditional inspiration porn harms the disabled community by propagating false narratives and not doing justice to real experiences of disabled people, this engineering version of inspiration porn neglects to address the design problems most critical to our community while pulling away obviously-talented designers and chair-loads of cash that could have been focused on solving them.
> I would give at least a few of my quad fingers for a high quality, lightweight, low-profile indoor/outdoor power chair with the customizable seating and back options I rely on. Same for a stable shower chair that could safely navigate step-in showers. I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel(chair), but tweaking and refining the designs we have to optimize independence and function for users.
> Like I wrote in the previous article in this series, there are brilliant designers working on these and other similar issues but we need more! More minds, more money, more eyeballs focused on improving what we have and doing so in affordable ways.
> I genuinely appreciate the designers behind the “Walk me” (even if I wholeheartedly question whomever decided the name should sound like wheelchair users are the crabchair’s pets). I hope their experience designing the crabchair got them excited about disability-related design and that they continue to pursue it.
> All I ask is that instead of sitting in their corporate labs, bouncing ideas off each other, they get out into the real world. They should dedicate themselves to engaging and listening to the disability community about what problems need solving and what does and doesn’t work. We know. We get it.