Through the application of the Disability led Design approach, the children of the Energy Family Project association have transformed into young volunteers and, thanks to their ingenuity and creativity, have conceived the devices of the future.

How did the idea come about?

“Create your device” is an event organized by volunteers to put children at the center of the creation of devices. Its first edition was held in Rome, in the setting of the Fabulous Village, immersed in the pine forest of Castel Porziano, over two separate weekends. A first appointment was on the weekend of September 15th to 17th, while a second appointment was from September 22nd to 24th.

The idea was born from an e-Nable volunteer, as well as a PhD student in design at La Sapienza University of Rome, whose PhD thesis investigates the possibilities of a new approach to design, led by people with disabilities.

The approach is that of "Disability led Design" and allows us to go beyond simple user participation, the latter rather becomes a starting point and provides an essential contribution to the project. In contrast to other approaches, disability-led design “seeks to speculatively respond to, amplify, or celebrate some aspect of the identity and culture of people with disabilities. Disability-driven design outcomes are characterized by a change in how we perceive and interact with a category of object, space, or system, and a resulting change in the meaning assigned to it” (National Endowment for the Arts, 2021, p .23).

In fact, more and more often even in the industrial sector, a user-based process is being implemented, in which the design of devices and aids starts from the users, and not from designers removed from the context and environment in which these aids should be used .

With the aim of stimulating children in their creativity and inventiveness, starting from skills that they acquire at school, this different approach to design has been tested, so that the children themselves generate ideas for new devices, placing them at the center of a real creative process.

The goal is, starting from the ideas that the children have developed, leave the space for e-Nable makers to delve deeper into those ideas and make them reality, printing new unique and personalized devices that can help children in daily life, play and sport. The devices imagined by children will be the result of their creativity and will respond to needs that are important to them.

The event was accompanied by moments of play, relaxation and sharing. In addition to the children, the parents and, sometimes, the children's grandparents were also protagonists. Experiences were shared, problems and needs highlighted, and finally measures were taken for new devices, which some children received during the event.

The first day

The event had two appointments, each lasting two days. The mornings were dedicated to activities led by e-Nable volunteers, while the afternoons were left to moments of leisure in the swimming pool and on the campsite.

On Saturday morning, after breakfast, children and parents were guided to discover the e-Nable project. In fact, all the families knew about the Energy Family Project association, of which they are an active part, but very few of them had any idea of the activity of the e-Nable volunteers. While the parents then listened to a more technical explanation of the project, the children were told the story of “Vittoria and the strange train”.

Thanks to the story of Vittoria and Doctor Protesius, the children began to understand the work of the volunteers, the functioning of the 3D printer was explained to them and they empathized with little Vittoria, starting to want a train all for themselves too .

Once reunited, the children and their families were presented with some examples of the devices printed by the volunteers and their functions. At the moment of discovering those little toy hands, the children got excited and tried to understand what the different aids proposed were for. Last but not least, the Bike Adapter, a device presented by the association at Maker Faire 2022.

The children were then encouraged to draw their dream device. The goal was to let them imagine devices that could serve their daily lives.

The second day

On Sunday morning, after all the stimuli of Saturday morning, the children's creativity was left free. Plasticine, sheets and rulers, scissors, colors and everything needed to try to prototype a first example of a device were made available to them. The volunteers tried to guide the children and their siblings in creative development.

Just like the children, the parents were also put to the test. They had to try to come up with functional ideas for new devices that their children could use.

Reflections

During these days, several interesting ideas emerged, which will guide the e-Nable makers in the conception of new devices to then share with the international community.

Furthermore, the entire process, which puts into practice the principles of Disability led Design, as well as the prototypes created from the children's ideas, will be described by e-Nable at this year's Maker Faire. 

The idea of the Bike Adapter was born in a period of maximum inspiration in the design of devices in 2020 by Michele Praga, not only passionate about model aircraft and a skilled pilot but with a strong note of genius in his mind: he is able to see a solution where a ordinary person would see only resignation. This gift of his combined with his propensity to help people with disability problems means that he has a real volcano in full swing. And like the best geniuses, how is an idea born? Obviously in my sleep imagining and dreaming about the device.

The idea was born precisely from the need to convey normality in daily life activities and to facilitate children's introduction to prostheses it was deemed necessary to design aids for everyday life including sport, which has always been an unspeakable sign of inclusion and group.

Until then there were few good solutions to allow people without hands to ride bicycles. The few existing solutions were too complex and fragile, often made of plastic materials, which could have broken in the event of a fall, resulting in sharp and dangerous edges. At that time it made extensive use of elastic materials (TPU) for 3D printing, a practically indestructible solution, in the creation of devices. In fact, unlike normal printing materials, such as PLA, PETG and ABS, it does not have the defect of delamination and resists high temperatures. The decision was to create a joint system to be fixed to the bicycle handlebars, which was in a single piece and exploited the elasticity of the TPU as a hinge, in this way an eternal and indestructible device would be obtained. After the first sketches of the project by hand, and the first CADs on the PC, Michele started with the first print, long and slow due to the extremely soft materials... the 10 January 2021 the first Bike Adapter was adapted to the bike handlebars and ready for testing. Michele, not having any disability, did a test by putting a sock on the fist of his hand to simulate the missing limb and started walking around the street; to his great amazement his project worked! After the first test he presented the idea to the Enable community and from then on the idea was developed. It took some time to go from a prototype to a definitive device and a lot of help from another community volunteer: Alessandro Villa, an expert in 3D design and graphics.

Until now the device had only been tested on Greta, but everyone's desire was to make it usable for anyone who needed it. In fact, it was necessary to make the device scalable and adaptable to the various needs of people with different limb sizes. To solve this problem Alessandro relied on a parametric modeling software called Fusion 360 and the turning point was precisely the adjective PARAMETRIC. In fact, the recipient family is asked to take essentially six measurements: the distance between the base of the elbow and the fist in the healthy limb, the distance between the base of the elbow and the end of the stump, the circumference at the end of the stump, the circumference at the base of the stump, near the elbow, the diameter of the manubrium, and the distance between the inside crease of the elbow and the end of the stump. And, without going into too much detail, by combining sketches, extrusions, circular series, fillets and other similar gadgets, it was possible to link these measurements with the creation of the famous customized 3D file.

One of the current limits is that at the moment it has not been possible to replicate the project on another online parametric modeling software called OnShape. Also in this case there is a professional version and a free one. We have migrated the project to the OnShape platform in view of future developments as it is a "user friendly" platform. This is the step to effectively make the project international, breaking the constraints of territoriality and giving anyone who owns a printer the opportunity to create their own device. Obviously we tried to reduce and simplify the intervention of the families as much as possible during the initial phase of taking the parameters by reducing the acquisition time of the biometric parameters in just 5 minutes to avoid errors as much as possible.

The first test in January 2021 brought so much joy and hope, tears and satisfaction to the inventor and creator of the project and to all those who supported him by believing in him. It was the beginning of something beautiful, it was a moment of great strength to believe more and more in the project and how much more normal it would make the children's lives, because there is nothing more beautiful than having a nice bike ride with friends. To think that with little, both in terms of money and time, you can allow a child suffering from agenesis or trans-radial amputation to ride a bicycle is irrelevant, and the emotion is even stronger.

Article by Giulia Mariani

The challenge is one of the most difficult ones: to create a device that can adapt to a child who has a particular problem, an agenesis of four fingers of the hand with only the residual thumb.

The standard e-Nable devices are not useful in this case because they do not contemplate this possibility, the other opensource solutions available are not adequate because morphologically not compatible with the child's hand, something new, unique and specific is needed. for the little girl, we need all of our skills to be able to create the device to give to the little one.

The modification of the 3D model turned out to be extremely complex due to a series of technical issues, but thanks to the help of the friends of 4DoItaly we were able to obtain what appears to be a good result.

Having prepared the 3D model, we moved on to customization to make it unique and pleasant for the child, even here the request was "special", because each recipient of our devices is special.

His desire was to have a pink device with a unicorn on the palm, so we immediately got to work to make it happen, even here after a few weeks of testing and countless attempts we ask our friends for help who, thanks to their proven experience, show us the way on how to work with meshes.

https://youtu.be/NhpZyQKiSrM

The rest of the work is the work of Alessandro, our most tireless of volunteers, he is good, he is technically very well prepared and is always ready to contribute to any project.

Together we worked together to fine-tune the final model with the 3D components that would make up the final device.

Once the design was finished, we moved on to printing, here thanks to Palette, the device we bought with the donations arrived at e-Nable Italia, we thought we would have an easy life and make a fantastic multi-color print, but nothing is taken for granted and nothing is simple, even here tests and trials (each print took from 6 to 14/20 hours) to no end, because the device is very powerful but using it requires a great knowledge of an infinite number of configuration parameters in generating the file for the printer and a meticulous control of every detail.

Hours, days of tests and trials, spools of filaments and hours and hours (literally nights) of work to develop profiles and an adequate printing procedure.

To arrive at a test device that is almost acceptable, to date we may have worked for over 150 hours on the device, but there is still work to be done: the fitting is not accurate and the unicorn just doesn't want to be printed. properly with Palette ...

The next steps:

1. modify the printer to operate in direct drive mode and improve control with color printing
2. wait for the arrival of the last gift they generously gave us, a 3D scanner to scan the hand and perfectly calibrate the size of the print

Because we don't stop until we see the unicorn fly!

It is incredible how in a very short time, thanks to the support of those who believe in our project and support us, we are managing to acquire tools that we had not even remotely imagined we could use.

Today Palette 2 Pro S has finally arrived, it is a fantastic device that connects to any printer and allows you to transform it from a simple "monochrome" printer to a "color" printer.

It will allow us to print devices with up to four simultaneous colors, there are not many, but in the world of 3D printing they are an immense goal and this device in the hands of our volunteers will be able to transform our children's dreams into reality, allowing us to create even more devices. beautiful and colorful and to improve children's acceptance.

In fact, experience teaches us that the more the device is pleasant and close to the child's imagination, the more he is happy to use it.

From today we will continue to work with even greater commitment and with the spirit and will that distinguishes us, aware that this type of devices are extremely complex and require a great deal of work to be used in the best possible way, but also confident of being able to reach new and unexpected goals and to be able to do better and better!

A device for… Iron Man!

A new device for an Iron Man fan.
Based on the original project by Team Unlimbited, (https://www.teamunlimbited.org/) has been remodeled in some parts with Fusion360.
Here are some renderings