The aesthetics of prosthetics: Kevin Connolly at TEDxBozeman

all right bear with me I gotta get Mike tup here sorry for the awkwardness but the opportunity to give yourself a piggyback is one that is a rare novel and should never be passed up so hi I'm Kevin Connolly as per the introduction I was born without legs I figured we would get that out of the way earlier this is my second half and almost as unique as being born without legs as a totally otherwise healthy baby was the fact that I was born in Montana now for those that haven't been in Montana before we're almost we're almost more of like a territory there's not many of us and what I found you know as a young kid and certainly my parents echoed this was that we we kind of sat outside of the realm of you know Western medicine and a lot of the hospitals that would provide kind of predetermined answers for someone with a physical disability so most instead of standing in the hospital or sitting in a hospital in a wheelchair most of my time was actually spent a little bit more like this Montana's winter is usually about nine months out of the year so you're pretty much buried in snow almost all the time between that and camping because of course we don't have pro sports teams or you know resorts or theme parks or anything else this was pretty much how I occupied my time and my parents took it upon themselves from a pretty early age to try and just get around any obstacle that that we could regardless of how it looked like or you know how it was built now contrasting that was the doctors and prosthetics that I met very early on at Shriners Hospital in Spokane Washington now I remember pretty clearly as a little kid sitting in a you know whitewashed hospital room and seeing you know a half-dozen doctor sitting around a table and they were all kind of vexed by this question this kid without legs has problems getting around so their answer from the get-go was to try and give me legs now the problem with this was the fact that I didn't have stumps I didn't have anything that would allow me to make a bipedal motion that's what you guys for the most part do instead how I have to walk is something called a swing through gate alright keep that in your head because it's going to come up a little bit later so what ended up happening was I was kind of put into a pair of still ie these things and for the most part if you ever saw me in my legs as a little kid this is what it looked like kind of nicely posed for Christmas photos but but see this is the thing is that you couldn't actually move around in these things at all if so you needed crutches and for the most part they were just these ungainly beasts and so you know the question that I would maybe pose to you guys is how long would you be willing to wear stilts in order to look like everybody else now maybe as like well-adjusted adults you could you know pass that off for quite a while but as an angst-ridden teenager you get sore and tired of that pretty quickly so for the most part anytime I needed to move around this was more likely the photo this is actually ironically enough walking to the hospital trying to cross the street and I was so much more faster on my hands that mom would oftentimes carry the legs and in fact if I was to if I was to have walked out in these things it would have been a lot slower than if I would have given them a piggyback which I don't even think we need to get into the performative layers of that one so what we often found when we weren't in this kind of like hospital system out on the west coast what we found was that solving problems when you weren't worried about what you looked like you weren't concerned about what looked normal oftentimes the solutions were wonderfully simple and much more effective than the multi-thousand dollar counterparts that were provided to us by doctors so this thing and I'm I'm not very good with names so we're just gonna call it a butt boot okay now I mentioned a little while ago that Montana has about you know nine months out of the year's winter and what we saved on shoes you know while I was growing up we oftentimes lost on pants they're dragging them through rock dirt and all sorts of snow so the rather than jump in legs and try and hobble around on your crutches my dad approached a local cobbler in my hometown of Helena Montana and had him make me basically a set of pants out of deerskin so rather than a butt boot I guess it would have been the first one is more of like a butt moccasin you could stock deer through the woods it's great and this solution which was much cheaper much more easily repairable and you know ultimately you could find every piece to this device within you know a couple miles of where you lived was much more liberating than something like this that took you know a couple months in order to send back and forth lots of money in order to build and usually you were building them with custom fabricated parts now as I got a bit older and started traveling for my photo project that I think was mentioned a little while ago I ended up using a skateboard this is how my point of view looks when I'm looking down right now so we can all have kind of a group moment together and funny enough the message on the bottom has a very very long-winded please you haven't no legged guys skateboard do not steal this if you have a change of heart email me but what I found was that you know this again and maybe here's a movie to roll in the background while I try and explain this this again as you can see was way more efficient than running on my hands or you know using these things obviously you're getting stared at and people may or may not be a little frightened of a legless guy moving at 20 miles an hour on the ground but at the end of the day you know you're gonna get stared at in these anyway and you know for me efficiency was way more important than anything that these could provide now the other cool thing and I think something that you know a lot of people maybe discount unless they have dealt with a physical disability before is the fact that the skateboard and the butt boot were incredibly liberating and I'm gonna say this in terms of where I'm even sitting right now they could be repaired or rebuilt within a ten-block square radius of actually where we're all sitting right now not having to deal with hospitals or doctors or you know the time it takes to custom build something for you is incredibly liberating you know this was taken in Dubrovnik Croatia and any of them even if something broke their Bosnia Montenegro China any of the places I went as long as I had some power tools a hardware store and maybe a couple bits of leather for the most part I'd be good to go excuse me so over the past couple years I've started thinking trying to take this to new levels the idea of okay so what if we get rid of this underlying paradigm that all prosthetics had to make someone look normal or you know I had to look close to the human you know the average human counterpart you know what what possibilities can be afforded to you when you try and design a prosthetic outside of that realm so this was kind of the first thing that I came upon and this note the googly eyes these are their real-life counterparts right here and I call him I guess cheetah legs um they were built for about five hundred dollars in parts and again they could it could all be rebuilt within about a 10 square block radius of here and the cool thing about these and we're gonna flip through really quickly the cool thing about these is that it utilizes the exact same way I move now we use the swing through gate remember I talked about that earlier and you're only about six inches off the ground so you haven't radically compromised your center of gravity now the only real thing that this does is it gives me about a two foot standing vertical leap which looks frightening as hell and it also allows you to gallop at speeds that are about twice the speed as I would walking on my hands okay so again you're getting stared at but you're also getting to do things that your body could have never done before and in some ways is more capable of you know the human counterpart in this case would probably be whatever your legs are this is another one bounding through the wild glut grasslands of Wyoming and this is the next design that I began working on with actually a local firm here in Bozeman this is a mono ski some people especially in you know the adaptive sporting community knows what it is but the important thing to note is that in a lot of ways it's much much more effective than a pair of legs on a ski hill would be granted you look like a frightening kind of Android cyborg thing which has an aside if you ever asked that by a frightened little eight-year-old the best answer you can possibly give is just a stone-cold affirmative but it works fantastically well you know your quads don't get tired when you're going through crud and powder if you blow a knee rather than have to go through six months of physical rehabilitation you replace the shock that's currently leaking oil and in a lot of ways because you have a lower center of gravity with a higher weight to surface ratio you actually have better aerodynamic capabilities than anybody no matter what kind of tuck they get into here's a shot of it in action and the final this final project that I'm working on currently is trying to actively assault these boundaries of what looks normal and how much better can we design ourselves and our headaches if we try and get rid of all of that you know I don't know that kind of undefined rule set this one is actually normally I ride a skateboard and this was kind of my attempt to make it a skateboard 2.0 this was actually filmed in Hawaii in January I believe when I was working on a TV show that's gonna be coming out and it is a mountain board that we took and we decided we needed to enhance it so after adding some suspension to it we figured it would be good to put a 52 cc engine to the back of it a little law it has a lawn mower pull start and everything it's wonderful and then realizing that I didn't have enough leverage because of how low I sat on the board we needed some handlebars so we went and we bought 22 inch motorcycle chopper bars with have a full throttle and brake system and everything else so normally people get scared when they see me riding on the skateboard but when that's a couple coupled with the high engine pitch they freak out twice as bad but all of these new devices just create an even larger contrast than what I was faced with early on in my life ie these things I'm gonna end the talk on maybe taking challenge or or issue with another Ted alumni Aimee Mullins who gave a wonderful talk in 2009 she is a model athlete and double amputee and the title of her her talk was my legs give me superpowers and after everything I've seen and lived in my life I tend to disagree I don't think legs give you superpowers I think design does

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 68,319

Rating: 4.9238095 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talk, Global Issues, United States, Legs, ted, Arms, Montana, Independence, Personal, ted talks, tedx talks, Science, tedx, Business, TEDxBozeman, Function, Technology, Education, Unique, Form, ted talk, Design, Disabled, ted x, TEDx

Id: uCZAmTAveII

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 21 2012