2016: Year in Review

As always, the end of the year is a good opportunity to take a look back at what's happened.  At the start of the year, I took the opportunity to look ahead, and see what was coming down the line in 2016. Now's the time to look back and see how things measured up.

Progress Against Objectives

Let's start out with the obvious spots - I set myself ten(!) goals this year: how did I do with them?

1. Complete WHISPER - Done!
Well, we completed WHISPER, and fairly successfully. Focus groups were run, a prototype was made and tested with users, and lab studies were conducted. I never did blog the outcomes, did I? Perhaps that's something for the new year. Anyway, as an exploratory exercise, it was very successful: we learned a lot about navigation challenges and the potential for haptic navigation. It's just a question of moving it forwards - which we're doing through an undergraduate project.

2. Submit five research proposals - Done!

At least, done if you include bids for internal funding. I was attached to four external applications (to EPSRC, one to Occulus' research programme, one to Hello Shenzen to host a maker, and one to Wellcome Trust for a seed award with Stuart Murray). The last of these was successful - which is great news.

Internally, I bid for EPSRC Impact Acceleration Funds to develop the Postural Sway Assessment Tool arising from Ian Flatters' PhD work; and a Sadler Seminar Series to help develop the Augmenting the Body Work with Stuart Murray. Both successful, which was great. Of course, internal bids can still involve as much effort as external ones - especially the Impact Acceleration bid.

And going for my Chartered Status also used a load of time that I had earmarked for proposals. The biggest disappointment, is that I didn't get my Fellowship in - I've been advised to leave it to one side, and focus on the areas that are paying off, but it's hard when you've put that much effort in, and you think "just another little push...".

3. Get research results from FATKAT - Done! Just not in the way expected.

It's been a very mixed year for FATKAT. Firstly, the original and revised builds died the death, and a ground-up rebuild was needed. So FATKAT isn't off gathering data for Will Shaw as I had expected. Instead we've had to invest in high-cost kit to ensure his PhD isn't hostage to FATKAT's development, and to provide a basis for benchmarking FATKAT's performance against.

However, FATKAT did get its first run out as part of Latif Ayzyze's PhD, getting handwriting grip and tip forces, and I have a student working on a revised manipulandum design. I'm also talking to the ingenious Pete Culmer about some of his boss new force sensors that might be a real boon... if we can get them to work. So, it's been a year of ups and downs for FATKAT - but that's the way with development. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy them.

4. Validate or refute my grip model - Done. Sort of.
I've got to be honest - I'm not entirely sure what I meant by this when I wrote it. I *think* this referred to the third of the papers I've mentioned above, though this is more of a reach-to-grasp model than a grip model. Anyway as far as I'm concerned the model is "validated" in the sense that it's been shown to be a plausible fit to the data, albeit its form has developed significantly from the one I had at the end of 2015. The bigger question now is whether we can use the model to formulate more complex predictions about prehension movements. One for 2017, there...

5. Get two high-quality journal papers submitted - Done!

At least - I have three such papers under review (two at the stage of being corrected, the third awaiting reviewers' comments) and one fully accepted. That said, it's only the initial submission that I can control, so as far as I'm concerned, I've done my bit on that one!

6. Use the laser cutter and 3D printer down at Leeds Hackspace - Not Done. ;_;
This is probably my biggest regret of the year - I didn't end up doing as much making as I'd have liked, and I didn't get myself trained up on the laser cutter or 3D printer, my time instead going into software and the Raspberry Pi. Speaking of which...

7. Get OpenCV and timelapse video working on my PiCAM - Done!
Albeit not used in anger - which I really must get round to. I've written a little time lapse piece (and yes, I know it's not rocket science, thanks...) for my Raspberry Pi, and got it up and running. I intended to take a time lapse picture of the sky's rotation at night to show my daughter, but having finished it in the summer, I've had it tucked away in a box waiting for the clear nights to get it running. Which we now have - so thanks for the reminder, blog! Must get onto that one ASAP...

8. Continue weekly(ish) updates on the blog - Done(ish).
Emphasis being  on the ish. We had a bit of a gap from February through July, but otherwise I've managed a couple of posts a month. I'll grant you, it's not weekly, but it's good enough for me. I'm mainly trying to avoid the lengthy multi-month gaps between posts. I'll hit 24 posts this year - one less than 2015, but much more than I posted in the first 18 months of the blog combined. So, at least the trend is positive. I think if I can make an average of a post a fortnight next year, I'll be feeling happy.

9. Include some non-weekly update posts; Done!
Albeit not quite as many as I intended - I managed three (on Margrit Schildrick, Why Body's Should End at the Skin, and Who are We Engineering For?). Five if you count this and the Year in Preview post! So that's some at any rate, and more than I managed last year.

10. Use tags and images more on the blog - Done. A bit.

Technically, I did use them more (given that the baseline was almost zero!) - but only for a few posts. It turns out, it's *really* hard to get good images. And to get Blogger to upload photos from my phone, for some reason. I'd end up having to email photos to myself and then upload from my PC. Not ideal, and when it became another barrier to actually posting, I just stopped.

So, not a bad year at all. That's nine out of ten done to my satisfaction - if not always in the way I expected. Speaking of which...

The Unknown Unknowns

Of course, not everything that happened this year was stuff I anticipated. The legendary unknown unknowns always crop up to throw things off-kilter. What were the unexpected turn of events this year?

Well, the biggest has to be getting chartered by the IMechE. This didn't come as that much of a surprise, since I had to put myself forward for the process, and starting the process had been on my To Do list for a while. The surprise came in the form of a Leeds-specific process being organised by our local Young Members so that postgrads could get chartered - and that rather forced my hand. Thereafter, actually getting chartered was more relief than surprise - you look at the criteria, and you're pretty sure that you fit, but it's always a relief when you get confirmation!

Secondly, has been the opportunity to start some potential collaborations with my former PACLab colleague Andrew Wilson (now at Leeds Beckett, and whose blog I have long mined for my understanding of Affordances!) on the affordances of throwing. Apart from offering the opportunity to expand my list of collaborators to include archaeologists (since one of the applications of this work is in evaluating archaeological finds to determine their suitability for throwing). It isn't the throwing that interests me - so much as the actual process of modelling task dynamics and mapping out affordances, which I think has some real potential as an application for design and ergonomics - but that's for the future.

Thirdly, the Augmenting the Body Sadler Seminar series has been paying real dividends, in terms of stimulating thinking and developing new contacts. The Tracking People network (of which I am on the steering group), likewise - lots of interesting thoughts coming together on the whole engineering imagination topic. Again, these aren't surprises, since we actually bid for them, but they're major factors for this year that didn't appear on my Year in Preview post.

Anything else? Well, CWUAAT 2016 was a real highlight. Some very thought provoking articles, even if I didn't quite get round to writing a whole blog post on the event (you can always go back through my Twitter feed for my thoughts at the time - once again, microblogging proves its strength!).

Outside work, I was impressed by the BBC's Microbit when it arrived. I've been enjoying playing round with it, and likewise Pimoroni's Flotilla.

Anyway - it's been a good year, all told. That's it from me for 2016: have a Merry Christmas, enjoy the festive period, and I'll see you in 2017 for my next Year in Preview...

5 w/c 14th November: The Plateau of Peak Teach

5 weeks?! Crumbs - even by my standards, that's slow going! Peak Teach was more plateau than peak, and it's only now - a week past the end of term, that I have finally cleared my desk of marking (45 hours' worth!), open days and industrial placements, and have the chance to pause and take stock. It hasn't all been teaching and admin, though: indeed, one of the great ironies of academic blogging is that the things that are most interesting to blog about tend to keep you too busy to blog!

Anyway - I intend to produce exactly one more substantive blog post this year: my traditional "Year in Review" post. That's partly because it'll take me a while to write my thoughts up properly and I have other things that I need to get back on top of before the Christmas break; and partly because I've done quite well on the blogging front this year, and I want to save some good material for next year, rather than rushing it all out before Christmas.

Anyway, in no particular order, here's a summary of the highlights of the last five weeks:

1) The third of the "Augmenting the Body" seminars took place on the 5th of December, with Dan Goodley and Angharad Beckett presenting on Disability and the DISHuman - some really interesting thoughts on technology, vulnerability, disability, and the posthuman;

2) The first of our AHRC-funded "Tracking People" workshops on the ethical and technnical challenges around electronic monitoring went ahead on the 14th of December, bringing together a range of people from Law, Ethics, technology, medicine and criminal justice to discuss the landscape - a really interesting day, with some fascinating cross-overs with the issues raised in Augmenting the Body;

3) I attended a great Innovation Workshop on rehab technology and unmet patient needs, run by Translate, among others. It was very informative, and thought provoking. Apart from anything else, it convinced me of the need for much of the objective measures I spend my time developing with PACLab (which was nice), but it was also a good opportunity to get new perspectives, and I was really struck by the problem of deconditioning, and the fact that rehab is a 24/7 process. Again, much crossover with the Augmenting the Body and Tracking People networks in various places...

4) Work has continued apace on PSAT (the Postural Sway Assessment Tool), which has started its provisional field testing and is shaping up nicely. Plans are now afoot for the final stages of the project, and we are getting into some detail now.

5) Finally, the Wellcome Trust Seed Award that I am involved with (led by Stuart Murray) on continuing our Augmenting the Body work, has been funded! That bodes well for next year...

6) I've finally decided to bite the bullet and get stuck into some Deleuze - specifically, Deleuze and Guatarri's "Thousand Plateaus", where the "assemblage" concept that so struck me in Margrit Schildrick's talk. There's a whole blog post in that, since to discuss it one must necessarily take a detour into matters of communication and the philosophy of science.

Until next time!

2 w/c 31st October: Peak Teach again!

One of the ironies of blogging is that at the times when you are doing your most interesting stuff, you just don't have time to blog about them. So it has been the past couple of weeks. This is the period we know as "peak teach" - that mid-term point where all the stuff you set in the early part of term comes back for marking, and all the stuff for the last part of term needs finalising. Of course, one always knows it's coming, so after a decade, it no longer catches me off guard.

Nor does it mean that research has fallen completely by the wayside: far from it, in fact. The last two weeks have been busy for a variety of reasons on the research front, for a good few reasons. As you will know if you've taken a look at my Twitter feed (one of many reasons why I like mirco-blogging!).

First up, part of the Augmenting the Body team (Stuart Murray, Sophie Jones, Amelia de Falco and myself) took a trip to visit Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy at Sheffield Robotics. It was particularly interesting, because they do a different type of research than my colleagues at Leeds - they are firmly focussed on Human-Robot Interaction, rather than novel technologies, and are using systems such as iCub and NAO, which were both exciting to see (and see Figures 1 and 2, below). There are lots of information about these systems available, so I won't go into detail here. Suffice to say it was a very informative and thought-provoking trip.

Figure 1: iCub, learning what a toy chicken is.

Figure 2: Stuart Murray with NAO.

Of course, part of the reason for doing that was the second Augmenting the Body seminar, this time on Redesigning the Human, featuring Tony Prescott and Andrew Cook (from Dundee). I'll try to write this up in more detail, but there were some really good questions raised about the future of technology and how it fits with humanity and society.

On a related note, I then gave my seminar at the IDEA (Interdisciplinary Ethics Applied) centre on the subject of Who are we engineering for? Again, it generated a lot of discussion, which was really useful - you can see the detail of my arguments in my previous blog post, and I'll try to write up some post-seminar thoughts in the future (time, as ever, permitting).

I attended a Centre for Disability Studies reading group on some of Margrit Schildrick's work. It was good fun, with some lively discussion, though I'm not sure how far we got through the ideas in the paper. On the plus side, at least everyone seemed non-plussed by some of the philosophical language: I was a bit worried that everyone would be off into complex discussions that I couldn't follow, but not a bit of it. I've now been tasked with reading Delueze from an engineer's perspective. Just the tricky question of which Delueze that should be...

Finally, a red letter day for the Postural Sway Assessment Tool: first build of the new design is up and running! Just got to get it cased, now, and then we're off gathering data! Exciting times, as long as the inevitable bugs aren't too onerous!

Anyway - onwards! Still lots to do. It may be a while before my next "non-update" post, but I'll do my  best!

Who Are We Engineering For?

I've been invited to give a presentation to the Interdisciplinary Ethics Applied Centre on engineering ethics on the 9th of November. I know the centre well, as I have co-taught undergraduates and co-supervised a PhD student with them (and that PhD student is now part of their staff). So it's not exactly a complete step in the dark, but it's still nerve wracking because I'm not an ethicist, and I know very little about the topic. To make matters worse, I'm going to bring in some of C. Wright Mills' Sociological Imagination, so even the material is outside my comfort zone, and the potential for things to go wrong is always there. But if you're afraid of things going wrong or looking foolish, research really, really isn't the game for you. After all, if I'm wrong, this is a great opportunity to find out, isn't it?

Anyway, I wanted to use this post to try out a few of the ideas I'm going to present. I picked the natty title: "The Engineering Imagination: Who are We Engineering For?", because that was one of the main things I wanted to discuss in this blog (hence the name!).  You can find the abstract here: I won't repeat it. Let's just blast into the ideas - with apologies if this seems a little off the top of my head.

Caveat Lector

Two things worth noting - once again, I'm skirting around disciplines that are not my own, and I may be wrong about one or more things here. Feel free to correct me. Also, I'm going to use the term "engineers" with slightly cavalier abandon, as if it were just engineers who make a lot of the decisions about our systems. In reality, a lot of what I'm discussing is shaped equally by many other players (designers, managers, therapists, clinicians, etc), and many of the same issues arise. But it was engineering I was asked to talk about, so that's where I'll focus, with the significant caveat that I realise it doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Who are We Engineering For?

There’s been a growing interest in engineering ethics recently. That’s not too surprising. 
Engineers play an increasingly significant role in the lives of most people today with our increasing use of - and dependence on – technology. This has always been the case, by the by: new technologies have been disrupting jobs and killing and injuring people as well as making life better and easier for centuries, probably millenia. The rate of technological advances, and in particular the increasing use of automation,  AI and autonomy have made this very visible in the last few decades.  So, it’s not surprising that there has been more and more emphasis on engineering ethics.

    Engineers are one of several professions that get the privilege – and by extension the responsibility – of making decisions that can have a massive impact on everyone’s lives. That doesn’t just apply to your top brass – the bosses at Google and Apple or NASA, for example.  Even a junior engineer can make an error or a typo that introduces a catastrophic bug.

    Decisions taken by engineers therefore have a huge impact on our lives, for better or worse, and this impact is increasingly being recognised by engineering’s professional bodies such as the Engineering Council and Royal Academy of Engineering, who are increasingly requiring that engineers abide by principles of accuracy and rigour; honesty and integrity; respect for life, law and the public good; and responsible leadership. Indeed, if you want to be a Chartered Engineer, you have to specifically provide a statement as part of your application that you have read and agree to abide by your body's Code of Conduct. It's the nearest thing engineers in the UK have to the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors, albeit much less famous.

These principles are pretty uncontroversial and I think it's fair to say that we pretty much require these of everyone we interact with. I also think the first two principles are straightforward, since they basically revolve around withholding service or giving inadequate service either deliberately (to encourage a bribe, for example) or inadvertently (by pretending greater competence than you possess). The last two, though are interesting though, because both relate to the public good, and socio-economic impacts. Among the bullet points expanding upon them are:

* Minimise and justify any adverse effect on society or on the natural environment for their own and succeeding generations; and

* Be aware of the issues that engineering and technology raise for society, and listen to the aspirations and concerns of others;

This requirement to act in the public good and for awareness of social impact create an interesting area not often explored by engineers, where there are no objectively “correct” answers. I wanted to use the seminar as an opportunity to explore my thinking on these areas, and review some of the work I'm aware of that addresses these.

What is an Engineer?

Perhaps a good place to start is by reviewing what constitutes an engineer. For most people, I suspect, the assumption is that engineers are people who work with engines (hence the name!) and machinery. Fixing boilers, cars and the like. Indeed, I do remember a Headteacher saying that GCSE maths might be important if you were going to be a mathematician, but not if you want to be an engineer, because you would never need to know trigonometry or calculus. FOR SHAME! Mathematics and the numerical modelling and analysis is the very bedrock of engineering!

The term engineer is not derived from the modern word engine (as in steam engine or combustion), but from the same root as ingenious - an engineer is therefore one who is ingenious, who develops new solutions to problems, new ways of doing things [1]. Within the parlance of the Engineering Council in the UK, we can distinguish three types of engineer:

Engineering Technicians "apply proven techniques and procedures to the solution of practical engineering problems";

Incorporated Engineers "maintain and manage applications of current and developing technology, and may undertake engineering design, development, manufacture, construction and operation"; and

Chartered Engineers "develop solutions to engineering problems using new or existing technologies, through innovation, creativity and change and/or they may have technical accountability for complex systems with significant levels of risk."

It's worth noting that this isn't a hierarchy: each represents a very different and important set of skills. You wouldn't ask me to fix your car, or operate a lathe. These take a lot of skill (you don't believe me? Come and have a chat to the technicians in our workshop some time - they certainly fit the requirement for being ingenious!). The key thing to note is that most of what engineers (as defined by the Engineering Council!) do is solving problems and for Chartered Engineers these tend to be problems we haven't seen before and/or don't understand very well. This suddenly makes the issue of what impacts those solutions might have a pretty serious matter - and that's what I want to explore with this whole "Engineering Imagination" business.

To Engineer is Human

I 've started compiling a reading list for the Engineering Imagination - the various books and texts that are great food for thought for engineers in this kind of situation. There are lots, by the way: I'm a long way from being the only engineer or academic thinking about this, and I'll try to put the list together in a blog post at some point. Anyway, two that make really good points are Louis Bucciarelli's Designing Engineers [3] and Henry Petroski's To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design [4].

    I'm an enormous admirer of Bucciarelli's work, and witnessing his keynote speech on the social nature of engineering design at a conference in the first year of my PhD fundamentally changed the orientation of my research, from models and numbers to how people used them, and basically set me off on the multidisciplinary path I've adopted. He introduced me to the Dual Nature of Technical artefacts - the fact that objects have both an objective physical nature, but also a subjective, intentional nature.  How well the physical nature meets the intentional nature determines how "good" the design is - but that clearly depends upon what you intend the design to do, and Designing Engineers is replete with examples of engineers working towards slightly different intents, and the difficulty of aligning their understanding of what they're trying to achieve. Bucciarelli's point is that while engineering science (the stuff  we tend to teach at Universities) is objective, rigorous and methodical, design (and engineering practice generally) is a social process, full of communication, miscommunication, fuzziness and competing social demands. When we have a clearly defined goal, when we've been using a technology for a while and understand what people might want to do with it, this is less of a problem. We understood, broadly speaking, the difference between what makes a good clock or watch. This has changed over the years, as the need for more precise time keeping has been required (particularly with railroads and navigation), but we have a pretty good grasp of what is needed - the challenge lies in delivering it. When we have a brand new technology, we don't have a good grasp of what people might want to do with it. We may have a view on how we think they'll use it, but we can't be sure.

This brings us neatly to Petroski's book, which deals explicity with engineering failures, and the fact that by definition a lot of engineering design deals with the unknown. We are constantly trying to make things lighter, faster, stronger, larger, taller, to push the boundaries. That means that the first time you do something, you build in a big safety margin, just in case. If you can't do that - flight (especially space flight), most noticeably, where extra weight is a huge problem - then testing the first build becomes extremely dangerous. Not because the engineers are careless or incompetent (any flight would be dangerous where this is the case), but because there is no way of knowing for sure that things will behave as expected, or that you haven't overlooked a critical factor, or that we haven't just crossed the line where our simplifying assumptions break down. That's one of the reasons why there are a lot of test flights before you put paying passengers onto a new model of aircraft.

This is a really fundamental point - to what extent do engineers need to foresee the potential dangers involved in their designs, particularly when boundaries are being pushed? There is an expectation that every eventuality must be accounted for, but sometimes you just can't predict what's going to happen.

The collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows bridge ("Galloping Gertie") is often used in dynamics lectures as an example of why it is so important to consider dynamic behaviour even in the design of seemingly static systems, such as bridges. The Tacoma Narrows bridge shook itself to pieces because of the way it caught the wind. Nowadays, every engineer knows (or should know) about this - but was this an engineering failure that should have been foreseen? Or was it just that this was the third longest suspension bridge in the world, and the methods used for controlling vibration had always worked before - why assume that they would fail now? That failure has paved the way for research that has allowed us to address the problem, and build better bridges.

A similar question arises with more modern buildings - the wind effects around Bridgewater place here in Leeds (which have unfortunately led to a death and several injuries) or the solar glare problems of 20 Fenchurch Street (the "Walkie Talkie"). Looking back, the problems seem obvious - but should they have been foreseen up front? I don't know the details of the design process, so I'm not going to comment on that aspect. Did no one think about it? Did it cross someone's mind, only to be forgotten? Did someone mention it in a meeting, just to be told "Don't be silly...". Of course, such questions will be in people's minds the next time.

This raises a slightly different question - to what extent do engineers have a responsibility to learn from history? An unexpected failure when you're trying to build the longest bridge or tallest building or an unusual shape is one thing. To repeat someone else's error is another, though this in turn might depend on how well publicised the original error was. Of course, these issues are related to physical problems - the problem can be modelled and predicted from the physical structure of the system. What we haven't discussed so far is the intentional equivalent: what happens when people use a product or system in a way we didn't intend? If I design a chair, do I need to consider that it might be used as a weapon? Or a ladder? To what extent might an engineer be reasonably expecetd to foresee not just the immediate physical consequences of their work, but the longer term social consequences?

The former are matters of honesty and integrity - recognising the limits of one's competence and when you are near the edge of what you can be sure about. The two points I highlighted earlier from the Engineering Council's ethical principles - "minimise and justify any adverse effect on society" and "Be aware of the issues that engineering and technology raise for society" take us beyond this, into matters of human behaviour and the intentional nature of engineering design. This is where the subtitle of this piece comes in: who are we engineering for? Whose intentions count?

Engineering and Society: Who are We Engineering For?

So, the Engineering Council have determined that engineers have some obligation to society, and that this goes beyond just being honest, competent and not abusing your position. It's not just about doing things right, but doing the right thing (as the saying goes). Doing something harmful in an honest and efficient way doesn't compensate for doing something harmful.  Of course, this leads to debates about what constitutes "harmful". Richard Bowen discusses this eloquently in his Engineering Ethics: Outline of an Aspirational Approach [5], where he discusses the discrepancy between the large proportion of engineers working on military projects, compared to those working on problems such as providing clean water, which might prevent conflict.

Weapons vs. water is an extreme example of the dichotomy facing engineers, and groups such as Engineers without Borders and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots are addressing precisely these issues. Weapons, like armies, are tolerated as a necessity: they can clearly cause harm, but defence is consider necessary for security. Things become more complicated when robots are involved, as the use of a robot to deliver a lethal bomb in a police operation demonstrated in Dallas this summer. However, we can rephrase this in less extreme versions with lots of things engineers develop: autonomous cars or surgical robots? New smartphones or renewable energy? Bill Gates gave an interesting video introduction to the Royal Academy of Engineering's  Engineering a Better World conference in September, where he notes that if engineers only solve the problems dictated by the market, we won't fix problems like Malaria. It's an interesting point: market forces tend to drive us towards solving the problems of those best able to pay, and those best able to pay tend to have the least problems.

Disability is a good example of this. The traditional medical model of disability tends to treat disability as a deviation from some norm (two arms, two legs, height in a certain range, two eyes, a certain amount of vision, hearing, strength, dexterity, etc) that needs to be corrected in some way. By contrast, the social model of disability views disability as arising from society's failure to accomodate an individual's given impairments. Under this model, being unable to use your legs isn't disabling as long as you can get around in, for example, a wheelchair. Stairs are disabling because they prevent this. This is a massive simplification, but catches the nub of the issue: if a person is unable to participate because of environmental barriers, then this is because at some point, an engineer has taken a decision that excluded rather than enabled that. That may or may not have been a conscious decision. Being disabled makes it more likely that you will be on a low income, and disabled people represent a relatively small share of the market, so it may not seem financially rewarding to make the required devices or adaptations. It's also difficult to know what other people's affordances for an object will be or even to realise what problems might exist in actions that you take for granted.  This raises the question of to what extent engineers have a duty to ensure the accessibility of the systems they develop. That's not simple, and the Inclusive Design team down at Cambridge EDC have done a lot of really helpful work on this. It is accepted that it's difficult to avoid all exclusion, but when do you decide you've done enough?

   Related to this is the term "assistive technology" - which taken literally is a tautology, since I can't think of any technology doesn't assist someone to do something that they couldn't do without it. The term is generally reserved for devices designed specifically to ameliorate the effects of an impairment. Yet, apart from being a neat pun, this rather highlights an interesting point. The function of technology is to enable - to compensate for some current lack. To afford an action that isn't available in the natural world, until it has been reshaped to provide it. Yes, this can be compensating for some perceived deviation from a norm - prosthetic arm serving to "fix" a person by replacing a missing limb, but it can also be to address a lack that even the most "normal" human (insofar as this exists) lacks.

Let's take an example that struck me after attending Margrit Schildrick's lecture on Rethinking Prosthetics: clothes as prosthetic fur. We aren't hairless, and given the existence of things like the hermit crab, we're not the only animal to use protective coverings not part of our natural bodies. Yet we use clothes, all the time. Not just for decency or fashion - for warmth, for protection. We use ladders to allow us to reach places that even the tallest human couldn't. We use mobile phones to project our voices to places we couldn't even shout to. So technology - all technology - is enabling in some way: either it allows you to do something you couldn't, or do something you could faster or with less errors, or it's pointless.

That's interesting, because it raises two questions - what should we enable? and who should we enable to do it? It makes me wonder (perhaps wrongly - I'm thinking aloud here)  if in this context we could reframe disabling (as defined by the social model) as "not enabling" or "selective enabling". Engineers make decisions that determine (both by accident and design) who can and can't access technologies and the new actions they afford. 

The Transhuman and The Posthuman

This raises an interesting issue. This interplay between technology, person and ability has given rise to some of the interesting notions around cyborgs and the way humanity develops as technology does. I recently read an interesting critique of the notion of our becoming 'hybrid beings', not because we aren't, but because we've always been (or at least - have been since long before recorded history). Nevertheless, more and more attention is being given to the fact that as technology develops, so too do our capabilities - and by extension, the gap between those who have access to them, and those who do not. Physical or cognitive capabilities aside, there are also cost and access issues in terms of who gets to use given bits of technology. So some technologies, and their benefits, are restricted to a small group of people.

The intertwining of person and technology and whether technological development forms part of an accelerated human evolution is the domain of transhumanism. I need to be careful about these definitions, as there is a lot of philosophical and ethical work on this, that is outside my domain, so I'm in danger of getting out of my depth with the terminology - so again, feel free to correct me. Most of what I know comes from perusing the UK Transhumanist Party website or reading the work of Nick Bostrom. I don't know that these are the best sources, but they're the most reliable ones that come readily to hand.

Posthumanism is the step beyond this - some people seem to regard transhumanism as a step towards posthumanism (Bostrom, for example - see his paper on Transhumanist Values) others seem to see posthumanism as more of a philosophical view of the world (as in post-humanist rather than post-human, I think?). Either way, the argument is more or less that at some point it will become difficult to separate humans, animals and machines and this will have quite a profound effect on our way of thinking. Wowsers.

In this worldview, engineers aren't just responsible for designing handy knick-knacks and infrastructure, or even for deciding who gets to participate and who is excluded. They (among others, as I noted before!) are effectively shaping human evolution. No pressure there, eh?

There's a twin danger here: one is in going down the route of addressing the ever more abstract goals of a small number of people - immortality for people in silicon valley, for example - rather than "wasting" resource on addressing the needs of less important people. Why worry about the disabled? We need to make sure that no asteroids destroy the earth before we achieve immortality! We need to get into space! The future of the species is depending on this, that we invest everything in the needs of the best and brightest. Here, of course, we rub up against the needs of the individual, versus the needs of society (NB: Bostrom cites "wide access" as one of his transhumanist values, so it is a little unfair to assume that transhumanists are arguing that we should focus on the need of the select few, I just highlight this as a danger that can crop up from this line of thinking in deciding the priorities of engineering resources).

The other is the risk of effectively colonising disability by extending it to those who don't get access to transhuman capabilities, focussing efforts on ensuring that more people get to participate in the transhuman future, at the expense of focussing on those who don't get participate in the human present.

In a short summary, here are some of the questions that arise from considering this

1) To what extent should engineers be held accountable for the "selective enabling" of the systems and technologies they devise?

2) To what extent do engineers have a responsibility to ensure the continuation of the species by, for example, preventing asteroid strikes or ensuring that humanity is able to colonise other planets?

3) What are the responsibilities of engineers in terms of steering human evolution, if the transhumanist view is correct?

4) How do we prioritise which problems engineers spend their time solving? Market forces? Equity? Maximising probability of humanity surviving into the posthuman future?

I don't provide any answers, but there are clear issues about to whom engineers have responsibility, and how that should be decided. This is particularly problematic (as any student of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem will attest) given that (except under very specific circumstances), there is no way of aggregating the preferences of multiple individuals that will ensure a rational outcome.

D'oh!

Of course, this perhaps highlights the importance of professional bodies in acting as the interface between the profession and society. But this leads me on to something else - the whole issue that I started this blog around: the Engineering Imagination. How do we give engineers the skills to address and think through some of these complicated issues?

The Engineering Imagination

The idea of the "Engineering Imagination" stemmed from reading C Wright Mills' Sociological Imagination [6] at the suggestion of Angharad Beckett (Sociologist and Co-Investigator on the Together Through Play project) back in 2012. This was a very influential book, I gather, and its ideas have taken on something of a life of their own (as most academic ideas do if they're still around half a century after their inception!). The book is largely about the craft and philosophy of sociological research, and one of Mills' key concepts was the relationship between "private troubles and public issues": in other words, that many of an individual's problems cannot be understood or solved purely from an individual perspective, but are influenced by the society around them, its history and norms. This requires "imagination" - the ability to step away from one's own norms, values and history and so examine the world anew.

    Does this have any relevance to engineering? Engineers are problem solvers, so certainly the issue of how people's problems relate to public issues are important. Clearly, regulation, policy and behavioural norms need to be recognised and considered. Yet, there's something a bit deeper than this. Just as individuals' problems need to be understood in terms of history and social norms, the same applies to technologies. It's that dual nature of technical artefacts again: while the physical nature may be objective, timeless and fixed, the intentional nature can shift with time. How we expect an object to be used will change with time. Developing a weapon today may have different implications than developing a weapon tomorrow. So, perhaps an Engineering Imagination is a useful tool - being able to look at a system being designed critically, from the outside, to view its relationship with the norms and culture and history it will be deployed in.

The question in my mind is: how do we help engineers develop it?

References

[1] See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/engineer
[2] See http://www.engc.org.uk/professional-registration/the-professional-titles/

[3] Bucciarelli LL (1994) Designing Engineers, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA 

[4] Petroski H (1985) To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, MacMillan: London
[5] Bowen WR (2009) Engineering Ethics: Outline of an Aspirational Approach, Springer-Verlag: London

[6] Mills CW (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press: Oxford

2 w/c 17th October: In Sickness and in Health...

I didn't end up in Malta, after all, after norovirus cut its way through my family the night before I was due to fly. So if you were looking forward to my write up of the LUDI meeting, I'm afraid you'll be as disappointed as I was. Still, in the spirit of being grateful for small mercies, at least it didn't hit ten hours later when I was on the plane, and my wife was spared trying to look after an ill family single handedly.

I still wasn't back in time to attend the first Augmented Bodies Seminar on Augmentation, Disability and Embodiment, but I gather it was be very popular (check out my Twitter feed for some of the questions that cropped up), which bodes well for the future.

One significant silver lining was that I did get to attend a useful seminar by Andrew Wilson of Leeds Beckett University (and the natty "Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists" blog) on affordances and throwing. It's an area we're hoping to collaborate on, and for me, the affordance angle is one I've been really interested in for a long time, so having the chance to look at this for a real world task is an exciting opportunity.

Affordances are complicated, and sometimes misunderstood, I'm not even going to attempt to define them here. However, the concept feeds into many of the things I've been thinking about with regards to inclusvity, capabilities, anthropometrics and augmented bodies, so I'll be putting together a blog post on this at some point.

What else? Well, apart from feeling ill and attending seminars, I've polished off my contribution two papers (noting of course the old pareto rule that it's the last 20% of the paper that takes 80% of the time...), and an impromptu proposal building up some work I did a few years ago with Cristobal Miralles from Valencia University. We also had a great meeting of our Augmented Bodies reading group, looking at the "Hands" chapter from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's book Staring: How We Look. Again, some great discussion, and I really need to get it written up. It was a long way out of my field, but it was fascinating how it tied in with the all the stuff I've been looking at in terms of throwing, grip, size weight illusions, even the emphasis was on cosmetic aspects of prosthetics, and unwanted attention.

Anyway, onwards - I'm preparing a seminar presentation on ethics in engineering to the Interdisciplinary Ethics group. That's a bit nerve wracking, as I'm no expert on ethics, but it's a good opportunity for me to think out loud about some of the topics at the back of my mind, and get some feedback on them.

I'm hoping to get a blog post up on this beforehand - a good chance to get my thoughts down. But then, I always hope that, don't I? :op

Bayesian Days

It's hard to believe, but we are now 4 weeks into our 12 week term (including Fresher's Week). As always with the start of term, it's been jam packed with teaching prep, getting undergraduate project selection sorted (which means lots of meetings with prospective students) and projects started.

Not as always, it has also been jam packed with taking a Coursera course on Bayesian Statistics. In PACLab, we're making increasing use of these to analyse data, so a bunch of us have all signed up and we've been running a study group on Wednesday afternoons. They've been quite good - the quizzes are useful for testing your knowledge and the videos are generally well explained. I've certainly got a better grasp on confidence intervals and credible intervals, and I'm looking forward to finishing it off. The study group has been particularly helpful: a good opportunity to get together and share our learning.

Also, PSAT (the Postural Sway Assessment Tool) is taking shape - literally. Or virtually - at least, we now have a working rig and user interface and a CAD model of the mounting systems. Parts have been ordered, and hopefully we will have our first build early next month.

All this (and, you know, actually delivering lectures and tutorials) means that I haven't had space for much else. However, next week, I'll be off to the next LUDI meeting in Malta, as we review guidelines for accessible play. Should be a good one: I'll let you know how I get on!

Here We Go Again...

One of the things I like about academic life (apart from the fact that you can witness people juggling and tightrope walking in Hyde Park, or riding Unicycles or mini-Penny Farthings down Woodhouse lane, as a matter of course) are the rhythms of campus life. Term time is always bustling, and come the summer, the space on campus is always a welcome change of pace - postgrads, researchers and staff are all still around, of course, and conferences and outreach events are going on, so campus is far from deserted, but for two months, the campus is a relative oasis of calm, a break after the intensity of exam boards and  graduations. And then, just when it's starting to feel a little too quiet, the undergrads are back and the whole campus explodes back into life. We're at just such a stage this week: the students are back, and the corridors and cafes are once again bustling with energy. It's a nice feel.

    I sometimes lament the periods where you do much but get little done - that is work a lot on various different big jobs that for weeks never quite get finished. That's not a problem (it's all progress, after all), but it can be dispiriting to see nothing disappearing from your To Do list after several weeks' work. This time of year is nearly the opposite: you do much, and get a lot of things ticked off the To Do list, but they're all such small jobs (book parking for visitors in week 1, make the VLE page live, update this set of slides), that they don't have the same sense of satisfaction as finally ticking off one of the big jobs.   Still, it's all progress, and these are the things that can snowball into big problems if not sorted out now. For a want of a nail, and all that...

    Right now, life revolves around preparations for term. I've written my exam, I've prepped my VLE areas (the automatic rollover of VLE areas from one year to the next is largely blessing, qwith a little bit of curse - as you have to work through and check for any rogue documents that might be out of date, make sure assignments are set up, that release dates for material are correct). Checking timetables, getting the timetable imported into my diary, meeting new tutees, presenting the UG projects that I'll have available.

     But there's also been the launch of the Sadler Seminar Series on Augmenting the Body with Stuart Murray and Sita Poppat among others (Follow @augmentedbodies on Twitter or see the LIHR Sadler seminar page for details. This will be exciting, though I'll be off at a LUDI network when the first one takes place (*sob*) but that still leaves me with five to attend. Also papers, proposals - just trying to get everything in place before teaching really kicks in - and learning to use our 3D scanner. I love my job.

Here's to the 2016/17 academic year!

Loose Ends

There I was, hoping for a whole batch of posts on the Engineering Imagination, but with one thing and another, it's been a busy old summer. Term is just a week away, and so now is the time of tidying up loose ends before starting anything new.

I've been trying to make sure my handouts are all printed, and my exam and several new lectures written before the start of term hits: once you're in the thick of teaching, you don't want to be stuck in reactive mode! Also finishing off two papers, preparing for a transfer viva, delivering a review and trying to finish off a grant proposal. These are all things that have been chugging merrily along for the summer, but need to be polished off before the impetus lost, and new things pop up on the horizon.

And there are a fair few things on the horizon for this autumn: a trip to the next LUDI workshop in Malta next month; the AHRC Tracking People network gets up and running with its first meeting in December, and the Augmenting the Body seminar series with Stuart Murray gets going for me in November (the first seminar is in October, but I'm in Malta then...). Also our current Postural Sway Assessment Tool project will be getting into data gathering mode in the next few months, and I'll be presenting at a seminar in our ethics centre.

So, I'll be trying to put some of that up here. And time permitting I'd like to get a reading list for the Engineering Imagination up here.

Only time will tell - stay tuned!

Why our bodies *should* end at the skin. And a few reasons they maybe don't have to.

One thing that writing the last post on Margrit Shildrick's Rethinking Prostheses talk has done is to get me thinking about that key question posed by Donna Haraway: "Why should our bodies end at the skin?". Or rather, it's got me thinking about it in more detail. I mentioned that this question in particular intrigued me in the context of the Human Computer Cyborg concept: I've always found it interesting the extent to which we engage with and utilise technology and our environment. However, this is very much a "systems perspective" - me thinking as an engineer. The notion that systems couple and uncouple to form new supersystems and subsystems is pretty inherent to the engineering mindset (more on this if I ever get round to reviewing Guru Madhaven's excellent "Think Like an Engineer" which is my current reading). One thing that did crop into my head though was the whole issue of the skin as a boundary, both physically and intentionally. These are thoughts in progress - I'm basically just throwing down what comes into my mind. Thinking out loud - or, er, thinking out visibly, at any rate.

Biology and Me
So, another caveat: I'm not a biologist. I dropped biology after doing GCSE dual-award science. I like physics and mathematics and mechanics: I like force diagrams, equilibria, calculus, equations of motion. I like the fact that a few fundamental principles build systematically on each other so that we can predict and model the behaviour of complex systems (with greater or lesser accuracy). Biology on the other hand (as I experienced it - maybe it's different as you go higher up) is all classifications and systems, and a soup of stuff that don't really tie logically together in my mind. I can't really explain it. You can ask my wife: she's a consultant geriatrician and the polar opposite of me in this respect. She likes classifications and symptoms and body systems and diagrams of organs, and really struggles with physics. It's like a whole different way of thinking: which may explain why she's a doctor and I'm an engineer, of course. I like biomechanics, though. That makes sense to me. A skeleton as a set of rigid body elements connected by actuated joints? Movement modelled using control theory? This I like. But I don't know much about the skin, so I may be completely wrong about all this. Feel free to let me know.

Unfortunately, the skin doesn't really feature in this reading. I've never done a model or a calculation where the skin was anything but a friction coefficient, with the annoying characteristic of being difficult to predict accurately (you might like to talk to my colleague Brian Henson who's done rather a lot on this!). So, in my engineering mindset, it's not difficult to conceive of a bit of extra mass or a longer rigid body, or of swapping bone for metal in hip replacements. There are huge practical issues to this integration, of course - but as a concept it's one that's easy for me to grasp. That makes the skin an interesting boundary.

The Five (plus) Senses
I was thinking about all this in the context of proprioception (the sense of where our body parts are relative to each other, even when we can't see them) as I was drawing up a control model for prehensile movements. Proprioception isn't tied in with the skin as far as I know - but it is contained within it. I mean, we have no proprioception for our hair, for example. That matters little to me these days, but in the days when I had hair reaching my waist, it wasn't too difficult to inadvertently lie down and trap it under it my shoulders because I didn't know that the sweeping it aside with my hand hadn't worked. Indeed, of the multitude of senses available, many (sensing temperature, vibrations, tasting, sense of balance, pain) rely on something interacting with or bypassing our skin. Even sight and sound rely on electromagnetic or airwaves being projected into our bodies. If I close my eyelids, no sight: if sound doesn't reach my ear drum, then I don't hear it. That's a very, very simplistic reading, of course, but it gives the jist. I don't have any external senses - the skin represents the limit of my ability to sense the world around me. It also represents the locus of my central nervous system's control. My skin represents the space envelope that I can project around me: I can adjust its shape and size and position by activating muscles and reorienting my skeleton, but if I want to exert forces on the world around me, they have to come through my skin. Again, this is very simplistic - biting, for example, would be a counter example. But for the most part, the skin is a good analogy for the physical boundary of the space I occupy, so it's not too surprising if we take it as the limit of a body.

Inner Space
A knee or hip replacement represents a clear crossing of the skin as a boundary, but doesn't change its nature. It swaps bone for metal, polymer and plastic. It seems reasonable to assume that these are subsumed into the person: though whether recipients feel that way is a different matter. The implant is clearly within the body, unlike an externally attached prosthetic: it's removal and replacement is nontrivial. Getting through the skin is a major event.

This raises another significant factor - namely the problem of piercing the skin. The skin is our first layer of defence - once broken, the way is open to many infections: a risk to any operation. Also, within the body, any outside material can be subject to rejection. The immune system can take exception: implanted sensors become fouled and damaged. It's not impossible to circumvent this, but the reality is that changes under the skin present a different challenge to those outside. Again, the skin represents a clear delineation between internal and external environments.

Body Modification
Another objection might be the issue of body modification: Tattoos and piercings. Not, I suppose, cosmetic surgery, since this might be taken to change the skin, rather than the inner or outer environments; implants are I suppose covered by the discussion above.

I know little of body modification, having no tattoos or piercings, and never feeling any desire for them, so my scope for discussion is limited and I could be way off the mark. I suppose, though, that piercings rely on reshaping the skin; tattoos might come under implants, though they are a little different in the sense of residing in the skin rather than under it. Thus, the skin marks a natural, clearly defined, objective, physical system boundary for defining the limits of the body and person. What objections could there be?

Hair, Nails and Whiskers
Of course, the hair and nails are body parts that reside outside the skin. We cut both off in a way we would not other parts of our body: they have no sensation, and we don't control them directly. But we would,  I think, instinctively recognise them as part of the body. If someone shaved your head, or cut off your ponytail,  would this be seen as the same as ripping someone's shirt?  Or something more personal? Whiskers are another interesting example - outside the body, but used for sensing.

Disassembly
Perhaps the most compelling argument for the skin defining our bodies is related to the issue of assembly (or assemblage, as discussed by Margrit Shildric - see my post on her talk). Fundamentally: disassembling anything within our skin causes injury.
    From a systems perspective, the skin delimits a system that is difficult to subdivide. I can remove my clothes and put on other clothes; I can pick up different tools; climb into or out of a car, with much less effort and risk than I could remove my arm, or my kidneys. There's a pretty clear difference there. Even disassembling a tattoo from the body is painful and time-consuming.  Compare that with a transfer which stays firmly outside the skin.
   A recent tweet from Open Bionics really brought this home to me. It concerns the recipient of the first hand transplant (or hands transplant, since both hands were replaced), who now wants them removed. This raises two interesting issues: first, it again raises the equivalence between transplants and prostheses as ways to replace or augment body parts. Secondly, it highlights the issue of the skin as a boundary: once grafted on, the hands are difficult and risky to remove in a way that prosthetic  hands are not. The same holds for a heart bypass, a pacemaker, an artificial hip. Once inside the skin, these things are very difficult to remove.

In summary, then: there are several good reasons to take the body as ending at the skin:

1. The skin represents the boundary of one's senses and actions. We can't sense anything that doesn't have some way of reaching the space envelope of the skin (including reflected light and sound - after all, eyes and ears are within this space) and we can't anything except through the intermediary of the skin (sound and breath being exceptions, but these originate within rather than without the envelope defined by the skin). Even a tool or instrumented which permits remote sensing or action then has to communicate to the body.

2. Removing things once they are within the skin is inherently more difficult than things without. The skin as a system boundary encompasses a system that is difficult to subdivide. Systems external to the skin are easier to assemble and disassemble with than those within the skin.

3. That very difficulty renders it more objective - it provides a physical definition of the space a person occupies, and a physical system boundary. You don't need to argue about which bits are in you and which are in someone else.

So it's pretty clear that our bodies end at the skin. Or is it?

Queering the Deal
There are a few interesting counterexamples. Of course, you can probably get into questions about what defines a body as opposed to what defines a person. I'm sure smarter minds than mine have grappled with exactly this, so bear with me if this is very basic.

Firstly: robotic prosthetics are a very interesting case. Take a look at Open Bionics' Ada hand (or any of their jazzy variants, for that matter!).  It has sensors and actuators, and intelligence.  It uses EMG to control it - reading signals sent to the muscles by the CNS. Admittedly, it doesn't feed back to the CNS, and it reads across the skin, but still. Colleagues at the University are working on stimulating nerve endings using vibrations to produce sensations for remote touch. Again, without breaking the skin, but still - once these are being controlled directly by the CNS, the boundary with the body blurs. A lot.

Secondly, there is a practical consideration.  I was struck by Sir Bert Massie CBE's post about the AT Hub, discussing the perils of compartmentalising AT. If you take the skin as the limit of the person, you miss the fact that many such devices aren't optional extras, but essential to their wellbeing, and if they are removed, damaged, or rendered unusable by circumstances, the consequences are just as disabling as losing part of the body. I'm talking out of turn there: making inferences from what I read, and about which I have little meaningful experience. And it almost certainly wasn't Sir Bert's intention to raise issues about the definition of the body, rather about the importance of communication and integration between stakeholders in AT and hence the need for the AT Hub.  

But it's an interesting issue, and important to the conception of the body and the self. In summary - there are some pretty good reasons to take the skin as a special boundary and as defining the limits of the body. But there are some practical reasons to extend that concept, and new technologies that rather blur the boundaries.

Anyway - these are just my musings: thinking out loud. Feel free to let me know your thoughts.

Margrit Shildrick: Rethinking Prostheses

It's been a little while since Margrit Shildrick gave her talk at Leeds Uni, titled "Rethinking Prostheses: Technologies, Boundaries and Embodiment", and this post has been slowly cobbled together in spare moments since then, but I think it ties nicely with the "Engineering Imagination" concept and is well worth getting down my thoughts on.

Caveat Lector

I'll put one significant caveat on the front of this: this presentation was way out of my discipline, and I'm not sure I have a good grasp of all the concepts involved. I had originally planned to go and read up on some of the issues: I still do, but thought it would be far better to get my gut reaction down. Examples of the phrases that I don't think mean what I think they mean are marxist (which to me means communist/socialist), feminist (which to me means women's rights and perspectives), embodiment (which to me is the way an idea takes physical form - such as moving from concept to embodiment design), and unproblematized (no idea what this means: based on the context I infer that something like "someone hasn't thought through the problems with this"). I don't say this to mock: just to highlight that jargon is an issue in cross-disciplinary work, and I may well have the wrong end of the stick. The point is that what I'm about to write is based on a lay perspective, so bear with me.

An engineer at a talk from Gender and Knowledge Production?

Margrit Shildrick is Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Linkoping University in Sweden. To date, I've had no exposure to her work except what I saw at her talk, so I'm coming to it fresh (read: naïve). However, with a title like "Rethinking Prostheses", it would seem odd for any engineer interested in prosthetics and AT not to go. My particular interest, however, lay in a question mentioned in the talk's advert: "Why should our bodies end at the skin?".

It turns out that this question was posed by Donna Haraway, another writer whom I had never come across (this will be a running theme - another common feature of multidisciplinarity - so let's just assume that unless I say otherwise, I'm not familiar with any of the work Shildrick mentioned). Wikipedia informs me that Haraway is "a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz", and author of "The Cyborg Manifesto".

I first became interested in the notion of the boundaries of where a person ends and the integration of technology into our selves (not necessarily into our bodies!) when in the early stage of my career a noted Professor mentioned in a conversation about Farrokh Mistree and decision analysis, Mistree's views the concept of "human computer cyborg" - the idea that we are all cyborgs now, since we interact so much with technology. I don't think Mistree originated the concept (I haven't managed to track down the origin of the phrase), and it was just a passing aside so we didn't discuss it in detail, but it made a huge impression on me. I mean, from a systems perspective, that makes a lot of sense - I incorporate my phone (say) into a human-machine system with myself multiple times per day. It may not be physically attached to me, but it's still an important part of me and how I interact with the world.

This concept assumed more importance as I began to take more interest in Assistive Technology. I had an interesting discussion with a clinician on the iPAM team back at ICORR 2007, where I differentiated inclusive design, rehabilitative technology and assistive technology thus:

Inclusive Design seeks to change the environment to fit the user by lowering demands;
Rehabilitation seeks to change the user by improving their capabilities; and
Assistive Technology intermediates between user and environment to lower demands.

The clinician disagreed with this - pointing out that "rehabilitation" can include prescribing AT. In other words, it was the human-machine system - the cyborg - that was changed in rehabilitation. We've since moved on to referring to "skills acquisition" in the work we do, partly because "rehabilitation" while suitable for post-stroke intervention, makes little sense when applied to helping children with motor impairments, and because we've since started applying the same principles and technologies to helping assess and train dentists and surgeons. But that conversation was another interesting step in the notion of the human machine cyborg, and Margrit Shildrick's talk was the first time I had seen this addressed explicitly (with the help of Google, I have since discovered quite a lot of writing on this area - it goes to show that sometimes you just need to know the right terms), and that's why I went. Indeed, it's the reason why I've been interested in working with Stuart Murray and Sita Popat here at Leeds on representations of the body - but that's another story.

Rethinking Prostheses

So, let me stumble into my impressions of the lecture itself. Shildrick noted that "embodiment is already technologically inflected", and that her interest was in "the point where distinction between naturally and artificially produced capabilities disappears". I don't have the language to understand the former, but the latter is certainly an interesting point. This crosses over a bit with some issues of embodied cognition and affordance that crop up in PAC Lab - action depends upon an interaction between a creature and environment. Whether the creature is a biological or mechanical entity, or a mixture of both is rather immaterial. I'm sure psychologists will correct me on that, since affordance is tied in with perception - we might query whether machines actually perceive affordances at the moment, but in this case, the discussion is about cyborg, not robot. The one doing the acting has some biological element. So far so good.

If I understood correctly, Shildrick made reference to Derrida's concept of "supplementarity, noting that organic and non-organic supplements of the body challenge its boundaries, that prostheses are "discursive frameworks as well as objects". Here we run into an issue with language and concepts - I'm not familiar with Derrida, or discursive frameworks (or whether that term carries a significant meaning beyond the literal), but I think the argument essentially amounted to the fact that prosthetics are not necessarily separate from the person using them, but can be part of that person. To my engineering mind, I would understand it as the person's "system boundary" shifting to incorporate the prosthetic - the prosthetic becoming a subsystem of the person, rather than a separate external system. Based on my limited discussions with users of prosthetics, and with Sita Popat (who is currently working with prosthetics users), this makes sense - some assimilate the prosthetics into their identity, some do not.

However, an interesting point arose about masculinity and prosthetics, Shildrick citing David Serlin's "Engineering Masculinity: Veterans and Prosthetics After World War Two", noting that much early work on prosthetics was focussed on allowing injured men to recover their masculinity, rather than being reduced to dependence on others, and noting that "functionality is often trumped by concern for appropriate gender roles". Again, I don't know the history here, but it's an interesting take - the balance between functionality and aesthetic, and which are more important, or what they should be. Shildrick argues that "the aesthetic body makes no distinction between natural and artificial", and argues for "including the non-organic as part of life".

    Her argument uses the concept of Deleuzian Assemblages (again - I'm not familiar with the work of Deleuze and Guattari cited) that occur in the disability field - not only the human-machine assemblages common with prosthetics and AT, but human-human assemblages (such as carers, family) and human-animal assemblages (such as guide dogs) . She also cites issues of phantom limbs (giving Alexa Wright's After Image as an example, visualising the position of missing limbs experienced by amputees), and the complex emotional experiences of recipients of organ donations, who must now incorporate an enormous change into their sense of identity. A lot of this is tied in with posthumanism - and a rethinking of bodily norms, which I think is what Shildrick was getting at. She notes performance artist Stelarc's third arm project, where he attaches and operates a third, prosthetic arm; Victoria Modesta's  spike leg performance in her Prototype video; and Lisa Bufano's incorporation of Queen Anne table legs as appendages in her dance routines. All are examples of prosthetics being used to supplement, or augment, rather than replace parts of the body. Shildrick concludes that this "opens up a new prosthetic imaginary... If we can't think differently, we can't do things differently."

   Intriguingly, I've jotted down two quotes whose context I can't remember and really wish I could. One says: "Humanised Swiss Army Knife", and the other "Radically though: technologised body can never be unproblematised, but it is already too late." I have no idea what either means, and I really wish I could remember! They obviously seemed significant at the time...

My Thoughts

So, I suspect a lot of the subtlety of the arguments was lost on me. Not being familiar with the texts or terms used definitely places me at a disadvantage, and I've deliberately not tried to read up on them to give you my innate response: I reserve the right to alter any or all of my opinions as I learn more on the subject.

Anyway, the core argument seems sensible to me, assuming I've interpreted it correctly: if we take our view of prosthetics (or, I would contend assistive and rehabilitation technology) as being to "fix" or restore a broken person to some "norm", then we are inevitably limiting their potential. I can see a certain merit in the "fix" line of thinking: firstly, the "norm" is what the majority of users of prosthetics and AT will have started from, and moving away from it exerts a loss of identity; and secondly, that we've designed the world around us based on those norms, so restoring the individual to that norm is the easiest way to get that person back into the environment.

I can also see some counter arguments to both points: that we make greater or lesser changes to our identities throughout our lives as our capabilities change (though few as abrupt or potentially disruptive as an amputation or, for example, stroke); that not everyone starts from the "norm" and the more we try to push everyone towards it the more difficult it becomes to be outside it; and that we can and should adapt the environment to reduce barriers anyway. Easier and more convenient for everyone to install lifts, drop kerbs and ramps rather than trying to design flying wheelchairs and pushchairs.

Shildrick's point about Deleuzian assemblages is interesting for exactly that reason. It recognises that actually, we aren't limited to technological solutions to impairment, since many inter-personal arrangements can be used, and nor do these relationships need to be constant at all times. To my engineering mind, this makes sense through the concept of systems. As a person, we all constitute a system made up of subsystems (nervous system, circulatory system, respiratory system, etc - all of which are made up of smaller systems, such as cells) and which interacts with a supersystem (our immediate environment and beyond - up to the level of the solar system, galaxy, eventually Universe - though few of us have to worry about things at that level!). Accordingly, one of the questions arises around where we draw the system boundary that defines ourselves. Is it just the biological system (our skin as system boundary?) or can it extend to incorporate prosthetics? Prosthetics may seem a natural inclusion, because of the norm mentioned above: if we understand the system boundary to be not our skin, but some Platonic ideal of the human as having two arms, two legs, two eyes, etc, etc then the prosthetic is automatically encompassed within that.

But if we're going to encompass prosthetics within the system boundary, why not wheelchairs? Crutches? Ventilators? We might take an insulin pump as being within the system if it's under the skin, but what about a Novopen that fulfils essentially the same function? Why not incorporate clothes? A smartphone, since almost everyone uses it as a prosthetic brain of some form? This gets a bit trite, since clearly we're dealing with some things (clothes, smartphones) that fall well within social norms, and some that fall without, but the point seems to stand. The system boundary of the person is constantly assembling and disassembling with other systems (people, animals, machines) to achieve its goals within a given environment.

Given that, I think Shildrick's argument is that we can rethink prostheses not just as a substitute for a body part to restore a lost "norm", but a space that can be rethought entirely based on what people want to achieve. Maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick - and naturally, there are all kinds of practical barriers to doing that. But movements such as OpenBionics and the Maker Movement begin to  make this more and more plausible. Perhaps the best Stelarc project to illustrate this is not the Third Hand but his extended arm - where the prosthetic offers capabilities not offered by an ordinary human hand. And this, of course, is where the engineering imagination comes in.

I mean, in a sense prosthetics have always been with humans: couldn't we see clothes as prosthetic fur? Weren't early spears, axes and arrows effectively a prosthetic version of the claws and teeth we lacked compared to other animals? Of course, at this point we're starting to get into post-humanism, trans-humanism, which opens up a whole other can of worms for discussion...