I nearly titled this "Too busy to blog", since it's been a fiendishly heavy duty month. That's partly due to exam boards - this is always quite a busy time of year, since marks need to be in and confirmed for the external examiners' visit come hell or high water - but this year things have been busier than usual, thanks to the upcoming SUITCEYES consortium meeting here at Leeds next month, and in particular the British Academy's first summer showcase, where Stuart Murray, Sattaporn Barnes (of Eatfish Design) and I were showing off our "Engineering the Imagination" project, and the resulting artificial hands that we developed.
It was a great time - if very busy (we spent about thirteen hours each over three days on our exhibition stand). Lots of good conversations! But let me back up a little: what is Engineering the Imagination? After all, you might have spotted a certain similarity to the title of this blog...
Engineering the Imagination is a year long project funded by the APEX scheme, intended to bring together sciences and the humanities. This particular project focuses on the design of artificial hands, and in particular the consideration of non- functional hands: which is hard for me, as an engineer, to get my head around. I suspect that Stuart and I have very different takes on the project. For Stuart, I think it's all about hands as metaphor, ideas of deficit and difference: what makes a hand 'disabled'? Why do we design artificial hands to be like 'normal' hands - and what makes a hand 'normal'? What do hands signify, and how does this change if the hand is artificial? Stuart would be better placed to explain his views.
For me, it's about exploring ideas about what we can do with artificial hands. Why not have a sixth finger? Lights? If we can't replicate the human hand, are there other ways an artificial hand could emote? Or function?
The designs we were showing off reflected this. There was the Empathy Hand: a powered hand that could adopt a range of poses; the three-fingered "Mudd Hand", based the hand of our collaborator Andy Mudd (who was also there to show the original that inspired it!) and the six-digit "Lunate Hand" which had a second thumb, inspired by the work of Clifford Tabin, and his comments about extra thumbs.
You can see images of all three, and the stand (for context!) below! Also, though we didn't have it ready in time for the Showcase, the Empathy Hand now has a light-up palm which, when pressed, causes the hand to light up and close in response. It was a great three days, but I'm aware that I'm already five days late with this update, so I think I'll call it a day there, and let you enjoy the pics!
 |
| The Stand as a Whole! |
 |
| The Mudd Hand: A three-fingered hand designed to mimic that of our collaborator, Andy Mudd |
 |
| The Lunate Hand: A six-digit hand adding an extra thumb from the palm. Named Lunate because we reckon that the thumb is attached roughly where the lunate bone is in the interest, and it sounded swish. |
 |
| The Empathy Hand: An artificial hand that can open and close in response to trigger signals. It is designed to be modular so that parts can be interchanged. Adding a light-up palm for example! At the moment it just has a range of poses triggered by button presses. |
 |
| The Empathy Hand getting to grips with the competition! |
 |
| The Mudd and Lunate Hands in Situ |
No comments:
Post a Comment