All Technology is Assistive Technology
From: Thoughtful Design - 09/20/2013
By: Sara Hendren

Six dispositions for designers on disability

All technology is assistive technology. Honestly - what technology are you
using that’s not assistive? Your smartphone? Your eyeglasses? Headphones? And
those three examples alone are assisting you in multiple registers: They’re
enabling or augmenting a sensory experience, say, or providing navigational
information.

"Assistive technology" implies a separate species of tools designed
exclusively for those people with a rather narrow set of diagnostic
“impairments” — impairments, in other words, that have been culturally
designated as needing special attention, as being particularly, grossly
abnormal. But are you sure your phone isn’t a crutch, as it were, for a whole
lot of unexamined needs? If the metrics were expansive enough, I think the
lines around what’s designated as assistive would start to get blurry pretty
quickly.

Read the entire article at:
https://medium.com/thoughtful-design/a8b9a581eb62

Links:
DEKA Arm
http://www.dekaresearch.com/deka_arm.shtml

Action Wheelchair
http://www.actiontrackchair.com/

Ekso Bionics
http://www.eksobionics.com/

Hearwear - the future of hearing
http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/hearwear.html

Tongue Drive System Goes inside the Mouth to Improve Performance and User
  Comfort 
http://www.news.gatech.edu/2012/02/19/tongue-drive-system-goes-inside-mouth-improve-performance-and-user-comfort

Sensory Therapies and Autism
http://www.templegrandin.com/

Squeeze Chair Project
http://wendyjacob.net/?page_id=123

Social Sewing
http://mikevanis.com/social-sewing

Bespoke artificial limbs
http://www.bespokeinnovations.com/

Jennifer Crupi - artist + metalsmith
http://jennifercrupi.com/index.html

Jennifer Crupi's "unguarded gestures"
http://ablersite.org/2013/03/19/jennifer-crupis-unguarded-gestures/

Inside the Prosthetic Imaginary: An Interview with Sara Hendren
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/oct/4/inside-prosthetic-imaginary-interview-sara-hendren/

Power Gesture
http://jennifercrupi.com/work-powergesture1a.html

Guarded Gestures
http://jennifercrupi.com/work-guard2b.html

Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design 
http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/books/399/0

Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics
http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Parts-Practical-Lives-Prosthetics/dp/0814761984/

Submitted by Rebecca McKinney