Tag Archives: Instructables

10- to 15-year-olds as superhero cyborgs

It’s not the first time someone’s tried to redesign a prosthetic (an Aug. 7, 2009 posting touched on reimagining prosthetic arms and other topics) but it’s the first project I’ve seen where children are the featured designers. A Jan. 27, 2016 article by Emily Price for The Guardian describes the idea,

In a hidden room in the back of a pier overlooking the San Francisco Bay, a young girl shoots glitter across the room with a flick of her wrist. On the other side of the room, a boy is shooting darts from his wrist – some travelling at least 20ft high, onto a landing above. It feels like a superhero training center or a party for the next generation of X-Men and, in a way, it is.

This is Superhero Cyborgs, an event that brings six children together with 3D design specialists and augmentation experts to create unique prosthetics that will turn each child into a kind of superhero.

The children are aged between 10 and 15 and all have upper-limb differences, having either been born without a hand or having lost a limb. They are spending five days with prosthetics experts and a design team from 3D software firm Autodesk, creating prosthetics that turn a replacement hand into something much more special.

“We started asking: ‘Why are we trying to replicate the functionality of a hand?’ when we could really do anything. Things that are way cooler that hands aren’t able to do,” says Kate Ganim, co-founder and co-director at KidMob, the nonprofit group that organised this project in partnership with San Rafael, California 3D software firm Autodesk. KidMob first ran this type of project at Rhode Island’s Brown University in 2014.

Details of each superhero prosthetic are being posted on the DIY site Instructables and hacking site Project Ignite in the hope that it inspires other groups, schools and individuals to follow suit. “A classroom might work on building a project and then donate a finished hand to someone they know or appoint it to someone in the community who is in need,” O’Rourke said.

I searched the Project Ignite website using the term ‘superhero cyborg’ and did not receive a single hit. I also used the search term on the Instructables website and got many hits but did not see one that resembled any of the project descriptions in Price’s article. Unfortunately, Price did not offer any suggestions for search terms.

Getting back to the project, Jessica Hullinger has written a March 28, 2016 article about Superhero Cyborgs for Fast Company where she follows one of the participants (Note: Links have been removed),

Jordan [Jordan Reeves, a 10-year-old from Columbia, Missouri] was born with a limb difference: her left arm stops just above the elbow. When she found out she was headed to the Superhero Cyborg workshop, she was over the moon. “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,'” she says.

Over the course of five days, she and five other kids between the ages of 10 and 15 worked with design experts and engineers from Autodesk to brainstorm ideas. “Basically, if they could design the prosthetic or body modification of their dreams in a superhero context, what would that look like?” asks Sarah O’Rourke, a senior product marketing manager with Autodesk.

For Jordan, it looks very sparkly. Her plan was to transform her arm into a cannon that spread a delightful cloud of glitter wherever she went. She started with a few sketches. Then she created a 3-D-printed cast of her arm and a plastic cuff made to fit over it, for prototyping purposes. The kids used Autodesk’s 3-D design tools like TinkerCAD and Fusion 360 to test their prototypes. …

“For us, our interest is in getting kids familiar with taking an idea from concept to execution and learning the skills along the way to do that,” says Ganim. “Ideally, it’s not about the end product they end up with out of workshop; it’s more about realizing they’re not just subject to what’s available on the market. It creates this interesting closed loop system where they’re both designer and end user. That is very powerful.”

The workshop is over now but the children will continue for a few months working on their designs and, in some cases, creating prostheses that can have practical applications.

You can find out more about Superhero Cyborgs in a Feb. 7, 2016 posting on the KIDmob website blog,

SuperHeroCyborgSydney
Sydney: A dual water gun shooter that will automatically refill itself

I got more information on KIDmob on the About page,

KIDmob is the mobile, kid-integrated design firm. We are a Bay Area fiscally sponsored not-for-profit organization that believes design education is an opportunity for creative engagement and community empowerment. We take our passion on the road to bring our innovative approach to local communities around the world.

We engage in the design process through project-based learning. KIDmob workshops use the design process as a beginning curriculum framework on which to build a customized local project brief, based on a partner-identified need. Our workshops facilitate partners in devising imaginative solutions for their community, by their community. We strive to foster local stewardship within all of our projects.

We promote an energetic, hands-on approach to learning – our workshops create an immersive environment of moving, shaking, sketching, whirling, splatting, slicing, sawing, jitterbugging creativity. When we are not swimming in post-it notes, we like to explore all kinds of technologies, from pencils to circuitry mills, as tools for creative expression.