Page 28 - Peter Farrelly Issue

Koalaa prosthetic team
to make the hand lighter,” and all these kinds of things. I went to ask Alex, who wore prosthetics, and he said, “I don’t want a hand. I don’t need a hand. I’m a designer. I just want to draw, to hold a pen.” And he was saying things that were so different, dimensionally different from what I was hearing from TV, if I Googled it, from asking those in the field. It was kind of like, when we spoke to people, especially like prosthetists, who’d been doing it the same way for a long time and were heavily trained and highly skilled, they’d say, “What you’re suggesting doesn’t make sense, it’s not right.”
I was always like, “I believe you, because you’ve been doing this longer than I’ve been alive.” But I keep hear- ing, “We’ve just got to keep trying,” and we kept trying, and it just kept not working. And so it’s funny that if you just listen to what people are asking for, you get these interesting things that shouldn’t be novel. More companies should just do that. That shouldn’t be a unique take on thing, should it? But it’s fun to uncover these things and this one’s no exception.
Kaplan: Yeah, it’s like, people expect us to want some- thing that’s one-to-one, something for us to fit in when we just want something that’s practical, that works.
Macabuag: That’s the thing. It depends where you get people in their journey. I’m was on a call earlier with people who are designing a project in Uganda. There the function that people want is, they just want to be able to go outside without being literally verbally and some- times physically attacked by the community. They just want cosmetics. It still has function, ultimately it took them a long time to get out of the mindset of the tradi- tional “replace the limb” into the mindset of “it’s a tool to do stuff.” That’s how we connected. We had a tool that was for surfing, and then I started hearing that someone seemed to have been using it for yoga. I went, “That’s mad!” I didn’t even know who it was. “That’s cool!” And then they came across you, Natalie, doing all these cool things and we had the opportunity to go to Seattle and meet. We just chatted all day and decided there was something here we could do together. Because you’re so into it. It makes our job quite simple. We just need to listen to what you say or what you like, and I know we’ll get something really cool, and I think we have.
Grazian: Yeah, yeah. Like what you said, just wanting something useful. And I agree, it’s totally contextual.
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