Health, care and prosthetics: co-design methodologies in the case of Autofabricantes

Abstract

Autofabricantes" is a participatory design collective that started at the Medialab Prado in Madrid in 2015. Its main aim is to co-design assistive devices and limb prostheses for children. Combining different types of experience and knowledge, engineers, designers, occupational therapists, and children have contributed to the creation of open source solutions. The following article analyzes this initiative focusing on how design-based strategies have helped to overcome different interests, types of knowledge and legal frameworks (Lafuente and Corsin, 2010) to create an open archive of different solutions and prostheses that can be replicated globally in fablabs or by local communities. By disentangling the material and technical elements of affective and aesthetic decisions, we will argue that the transformation of children into designers of their own members has contributed to empowering these communities and naturalizing a set of prosthetics (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2002). These artifacts and methodologies work as an answer to some of the problems that market-driven initiatives have not solved (Simonsen, Scheuer and Hertzum 2015). Until now, the market offers invasive and expensive designs over which the people concerned have no decision-making capacity or say.The paper will analyze a specific set of workshops, examining the protocols, steps, and strategies developed in order to create an atmosphere that allows for the collective design of complex sociotechnical artifacts (Corsín, 2014). It will also analyze how these workshops have given rise to increasingly imaginative products that challenge conventional ideas about how prosthetics and the body itself work and should look like. By introducing children into the design and production process, we can see the emergence of prototypes that go beyond function. This opens debates on how health, care, well-being and design are intertwined and materialized in specific material products to improve the quality of life and social justice (Constanza-Chock, 2020, Bordeleu, 2020.