Nobody Asked for a Crab Chair

In our last installment of “Good Intentions Gone Wrong: When Disability Engineers Go Bad,” we highlighted a particularly egregious Swiss wheelchair design featuring superfluous drones. Thankfully, not all engineers who receive blank checks to design disability solutions are that out of touch. More commonly, the lack of constraints that comes with deep corporate pockets results in sexy, future-forward designs with tantalizing possibilities that somehow leave me feeling more empty than excited. Toyota’s new-ish “Walk me” prototype could be the poster chair for what I’m talking about. The “Walk me” replaces wheels with four articulating legs that bend and move independently. Picture a four-legged crab with light-up legs carefully balancing an uncomfortable-looking seat. Using LiDAR, collision radars, and internal weight sensors, the crabchair can transport its user over uneven terrain or up and down stairs. With an aesthetically-pleasing pastel color palette and a chic, future-minimalist vibe, it’s easy to see why the crabchair was a hit when Toyota unveiled it last fall at the Japan Mobility Show. Let’s be clear: if I could have a free crabchair tomorrow, I’d be out the door, in the line to pick up my new robot legs before I knew where to go. But these kinds of prototypes are built to inspire and show what is possible, not to be mass produced for actual users. In short, don’t get your hopes up you’ll ever see a crabchair clawing its way down the street. They’re over-designed, cost prohibitive and generally out of touch with the realities facing most would-be users. They’re engineering inspiration porn. They make headlines (yes, I’m guilty), and make people feel like they’re helping an underserved community and making the world a better place. Unfortunately, they very rarely translate into real world benefits for people like us. That alone would be disappointing, but probably closer to a “no harm, no foul” situation: rich people and companies building expensive toys and patting themselves on the back. It has been going on forever and likely will into the future. My concern, and the thing that saps any enthusiasm the sleek design might inspire in me, is that much like more traditional inspiration porn harms the disabled community by propagating false narratives and not doing justice to real experiences of disabled people, this engineering version of inspiration porn neglects to address the design problems most critical to our community while pulling away obviously-talented designers and chair-loads of cash that could have been focused on solving them. I would give at least a few of my quad fingers for a high quality, lightweight, low-profile indoor/outdoor power chair with the customizable seating and back options I rely on. Same for a stable shower chair that could safely navigate step-in showers. I’m not talking about reinventing the wheel(chair), but tweaking and refining the designs we have to optimize independence and function for users. Like I wrote in the previous article in this series, there are brilliant designers working on these and other similar issues but we need more! More minds, more money, more eyeballs focused on improving what we have and doing so in affordable ways. I genuinely appreciate the designers behind the “Walk me” (even if I wholeheartedly question whomever decided the name should sound like wheelchair users are the crabchair’s pets). I hope their experience designing the crabchair got them excited about disability-related design and that they continue to pursue it. All I ask is that instead of sitting in their corporate labs, bouncing ideas off each other, they get out into the real world. They should dedicate themselves to engaging and listening to the disability community about what problems need solving and what does and doesn’t work. We know. We get it. Lord knows we don’t need any more designs like this…