When I first walked into this lab and
saw a young man named Derrick receiving an arm that was made
with a 3-D printer, I was just blown away.
I couldn't really believe it at all.
-I like to say, we make children smile,
we make parents weep, and we make nerds rejoice.
And any of those is actually a real badge of honor.
But to be able to do all three all at once,
which is what usually happens, is huge.
This whole things started one morning when I was sitting
at home, drinking coffee, avoiding preparing a class.
And I saw this Robohand video, which was created by Richard van As,
a South African carpenter, and Ivan Owen.
They produced this Robohand design, and
they put it on the Web open sourced.
And when I saw this, I put this comment on the YouTube video.
"Okay Makerbotters, if you're willing to receive inquiries
from people who need a Robohand, put yourself on the map."
-The designs are all free and open source.
The information,
the instructions are all free and easy to access.
And, frankly, the devices themselves,
we give away for free.
At some point, it became clear that this thing was
taking off, it was gonna continue to grow, and
that we had thousands, potentially tens of thousands of
people who were gonna be involved in this project.
And it turns out, we probably need to be able to support them.
So we created the non-profit E-NABLE Community Foundation.
-Yeah, maybe four on a typical day.
This is a hand that's gonna go on this arm
to go to a little girl named Lusie.
And if I can get it done before she gets here this
afternoon, she'll get to try it on.
-Lusie came in quite some time ago, three or four months ago,
and we began working out some new techniques for
how to customize the arm.
-We have a family friend who works here at RIT.
And so she had mentioned it to us at a family party probably
about two years ago?
-Awesome.
-We've gone through six or seven visits at this point, and
we've changed the design several times.
But she went home with her first arm, I don't know,
about two or three months ago, and she takes it to school.
She's a hero in her class, she's really excited.
She said what I really like about it is that I get to stack
cups, which apparently is what all the kids do,
and which she couldn't do before, and she does do it now.
And when I visited her class, the other kids said Lusie
is stacking cups now, and she's really good.
And so that's a big deal.
At least from what I see with these kids and I imagine they'd
be similar to myself, you go from being the kid with
the funny hand to being the kid with the robot hand, or
in some cases the kids with the super hero hand.
For the most part, she's living her life as a one-handed
person, but what e-NABLE is making now is a tool for
her to do other things that she can't do.
-About a year and a half ago,
Intel heard about what was going on and they wanted us to make
some kind of a presentation at their annual sales conference.
So, we give a four minute presentation.
I walk out and I explain I've started this new organization,
we're using 3D printers.
Peregrine walks out and
he's got his talon hand dangling from his belt loop.
He says, "so I was born‚" without self-consciousness,
"with a hand like this.
And my dad and I designed this thing, and
we use a 3D printer," and he goes boomp, boomp.
And everyone leaps to their feet and
they give him a standing ovation.
-Your brain has a map of where all your body parts are.
This started to be part of that.
So I'm not looking down at my hands and seeing well,
here's my hand and here's a weird plastic thing.
It's here's my hand and here's my other hand.
-Peregrine has subsequently written a number of really
interesting columns in which he says, I've come to think of
the hand as an extension of my body, and my body
as an extension of the hand's opportunity to redesign myself.
-Every time we make a new hand,
I'm seeing it as a prototype, this is just the next version.
Almost before it's even off the printer,
I'm already looking at ways to try and make it better.
What we're trying to do is we're trying to almost fast pace
what you would originally do with research and development.
So you have one idea here, and you have another idea here, and
you have someone who can help you make that idea either happen
or even better.
There are no single inventors here.
Skip can tell you a story.
That the way he tells it begins with my observation,
in a very hand-waving fashion, that our hands in their then
design, all of the fingers contract at once.
But we adaptive humans have what we call an adaptive grip,
in which different fingers will adjust and
clench to conform to the shape of the object.
I said, it oughta be possible to do that, and
I drew some cockamamie diagram in which I just imagined that
there would be one continuous loop of string
that would be shared among all of the fingers.
-He just published a sketch.
And a high school student on a summer job in a lab
across the country, in the same evening he started
working on a CAD design trying to test John's idea.
He published his findings, and then Steve Wood ended up
refining that and making it so that it would work in a hand.
And then, further, it was refined to what we have
currently by Skip Metze who works at our lab.
And reinvented a device that was named in the 19th century,
I think, called a whippletree.
I've been told recently that it was used for horse carriages.
-So it was an idea that was taken through different members
of the community and finally realized into what it is now.
-So today we now have what's called a tensioner box
which snaps into the grooves of the raptor hand
which contains the whippletree, which is derived
from that whole experimental lineage of half-baked ideas,
which is producing a pretty slick package right now.
So, from the original idea that we had for the whippletree
to having an arm that we used, it took about three months.
In the ordinary marketplace, that I've worked in for
40 years, that would probably take years.
In our community, we introduce improvements monthly.
Now, I can name most of the people who are involved in that
process, except what about 20 or
30 people who cheered it on, or who offered criticism, or
who said this didn't work, but that information was useful.
So all of that is possible in a community that is more
interested in coming up with a good solution to a problem than
in coming up with a proprietary
product that they can defend against intruders.
It's taken the open source community and that force of
development to really make it something worthwhile, and
a patent on it would have destroyed that capability.
And it would have severely stunted,
if not completely cut off, the growth of this project.
Our goal is to totally democratize the process so
that any amputee can find an appropriate device and
get access to the information and the design files and
make themselves an assistive mechanical device.
And it's clear that our key mission is to provide access,
not to protect treasure.