Youngest person ever with carbon-fiber legs

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/4290002.Brave_girl_Ellie_May_has_a_spring_in_her_step/

This goes in the design and society blog because it really shows how far we’ve come in our attitudes toward disability. Prosthetic legs used to be designed to conceal the fact that they were prosthetic. Never mind that their design wasn’t much good for anything except sitting down and looking “normal.”

Ellie May’s prosthetics don’t look like natural human legs at all and they don’t have to! They are her legs. We judge them based on their function, not appearance. They let her walk and play like her peers, without the hindering pretense of hiding her disability. We don’t have to do that anymore.

I’ll bet in the near future we are going to see more designs that serve useful functions without being tied to traditional forms. However, it is hard to break free of doing things the way we always have (I should know; it’s what we are trying to do with communication systems at Penn State right now.)

Disabilities in Pop Culture

Esquire has a list that I’m not sure if I should be amused or offended by.

“The Five Most Incredible Physically Disabled Action Movie Heroes”

It is a little surprising to me that Zatoichi, the Blind Samurai is not on this list.

Infrequent updates (another metablog entry)

So, in addition to my usual PhD stuff keeping me from updating this blog, I’ve also been dealing with a broken rib that I sustained in a bike crash.

This causes me extreme pain whenever I

• move
• lay down
• sit up
• switch from any of laying down, sitting up, or standing to any of the others.
• sneeze (oh my God, especially when I sneeze)
• reach for anything with my right hand (like my mouse or keyboard)

Lessons learned from this experience: