Jon Kuniholm, "Good Design by Design" | Talks at Google

Hi everybody, hear me ok?

Okay, so I think we're going to get going.

My name is Michael Wizmalik.

Our guest today: Jonathan Kuniholm.

I met him in I think 2007, as far as we can piece back together,

at a SIFU conference, and he had some pretty cool tech that he was demoing on some robotics stuff related to prosthetics.

And I was impressed enough that I said "You should come and give a talk at Google sometime"

and he took that to heart, and about four or five years later, emailed me and said "Hey, you offered that talk at Google. Now would be a great time."

So, we're hosting him today.

Johnathan is the president and founder of the open prosthetics project.

He's also the founder of stumpworks, a startup that focuses on prosthetic technology.

He's also presidential appointee to the national council on disability and the stuff he has to say is pretty cool.

So please, put your hands together and help me welcome Jon.

(applause)

Thanks very much Michael.

Let me just first offer a disclaimer with respect to my government job,

and they encourage us to do this, that everything I say today are my personal views and not reflective of any position of the government.

So what I would like to talk about today is how we can design good design to solve problems that society has for the most part neglected.

And I came across one of the problems personally after I lost my arm in 2005 and discovered that prosthetic arms were an orphan medical device.

And in thinking a little bit more about why prosthetic arms lagged so far behind other technology that we use everyday,

I started to realise that prosthetic arms and orphan medical devices are part of a larger group of those problems that society has tended to neglect,

which can be solved by something that we're beginning to call "public interested design."

And the question that I'd really like to talk about today, and I would actually like it to be the beginning of a discussion,

because it's something that by no means I claim to have begun to solve is how can we marshall all of the tools at our disposal trying to better solve those problems.

because very much now I believe that most of those problems are solved in a haphazard way.

Government funded projects, philanthropy, side-projects from industry,

you name the way that people happen upon these issues and try to solve them,

but in general, you can be sure that the resources and attention that we devote towards solving these underserved

needs are going to lag far behind those problems which are very obvious from every other standpoint that needs solving.

You know, very profitable things.

There was no question that cell phone technology was going to improve over the last ten years for example.

So in the summer of 2005, I took leave from graduate school at Duke University,

and I was deployed as a marine to Iraq and Anbar province.

And I was the platoon commander for an engineer platoon of about 15 marines,

and we were doing mostly what everbody was doing over there, which was sustainment and sustainability operations,

patrolling, guarding convoys, that sort of thing.

On New Year's Day of 2005, I was on a foot patrol that was ambushed by Improvised Explosive Device,

and the blast took off most of my forearm, and I found myself back in the States,

and learning about prosthetic arm technology.

I managed to get myself back to school, and get involved with a research project sponsored by DARPA,

called the "Revolutionising Prosthetics 2009 Project."

It was one of two that DARPA was funding, which was really the first

serious prosthetic arm research effort that had occured in the United States since -

maybe there was a small one in the 70s, but really -

since World War 2.

And the goal was a really ambitious one.

The goal was to create in four years in 2007,

an arm using commercially available technology that could go to market in that year, in 2007, and then

more ambitiously, to create an arm that had more degrees of freedom, was fully neurally integrated,

so nearly the same articulation as anative human arm and full strength.

An incredibly ambitious project.