Feng Zhou
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
There is a trend for handcrafting bespoke prostheses that embody their wearers’ aesthetic tastes and identities. We explore how this might be extended by enabling users to co-design with algorithms. We report a design-led exploration (Figure 1) in which professional disabled dancers danced with a generative design algorithm to create personalised designs called aesthetic seeds. Further algorithms applied these to prosthetic greaves, rendering them in various materials before optimising for additive manufacture. Interviews with our dancers revealed that the aesthetics of prosthetics reach beyond visual decoration to encompass form, function, bodily experience, body image, and identity; that interactions with generative design algorithms can harness people's expressive and aesthetic skills; and that we must redesign supporting technologies for diverse bodies. We generalise our findings into a process for how people may co-design 3D printable products with algorithms.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580803
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)