The Lows of High Tech

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
Britt Young is a geographer and tech writer based in the Bay Area… and she loves a good theme party.

Britt Young:
My whole life, I’ve done some silly themed parties.

Vivian Le:
And when she says “silly,” she’s not exaggerating.

Roman Mars:
Producer Vivian Le.

Vivian Le:
She told me about a party she once threw based on an obscure sitcom about a rural Canadian farming community. She also used to host annual ragers in honor of Billy Mays, you know… that guy from the OxiClean infomercials.

Roman Mars impersonating Billy Mays:
“Roman Mars here for 99PI!!”

Vivian Le:
But a few years ago, she threw her wildest party yet. It was an arm party.

Roman Mars:
Britt has what’s called a “congenital upper limb deficiency.” In other words, she was born without the part of her arm just below her left elbow. This latest celebration was a farewell to her boring, old prosthesis, and a welcome home to her brand new, multi-articulating bionic hand.

Britt Young:
We had a friend who played bartender and we had a bunch of arm-themed cocktails. There was ARM-ageddon, Pink ARM-adillo, a bunch of things like that.

Vivian Le:
There were also arm-themed games… like “arm Twister”–

Britt Young:
Which was normal Twister, but any time that you needed assistance, you could grab a free prosthetic arm to reach yellow five easier or whatever.

Roman Mars:
She even christened the high-tech arm by cutting a cake with it.

AUDIO FROM BRITT YOUNG’S ARM PARTY:
[I’M REALLY TRYING TO GET TWITTER FAMOUS SO PLEASE TWEET IT.]

Britt Young:
It just opened. So that’s the… that’s the, uh… What’s it called? It’s a fist.

Vivian Le:
This is the sound of Britt giving me a little demo of how her prosthetic hand works over Zoom. We ended up playing a sort of game of cyborg charades while she cycled through the different grip modes of her prosthesis.

Britt Young:
I call this one the “Obama talking point.” It’s like the thumb resting on top of the index finger, and you’re like… so you go… (mimes gesture of a talking point)

Britt Young:
This one might be like, “I am a sophisticated cyborg and I am handing you my credit card.”

Britt Young:
And so this one is like… Italian? (laughs)

Roman Mars:
This prosthetic hand has a sleek carbon fiber casing, with specific pre-programmed grips that she can control just by flexing the muscles in her residual limb. She can use a precision pinch to pick a hairpin up off of the table, or a Hulk-style power fist to squeeze objects. This kind of assistive technology has been life-changing for a lot of people who have limb differences.

Vivian Le:
But for Britt, in particular, it hasn’t been life-changing at all. In fact, her cutting-edge bionic arm has been a pretty major disappointment.

Britt Young:
It’s just not… it’s not what you imagine. It’s not like, “Well, I’m like everyone else now.” It’s something different… It’s something different.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Prosthetics go back thousands of years. The earliest known prosthesis is actually a wooden toe that dates to ancient Egypt. But while we’ve had prosthetics forever, we’ve only seen major advancements in their design in the last couple hundred years. Mostly thanks to the military.

David Serlin:
Their development is intricately, intimately, inextricably tied to the military.

Vivian Le:
This is David Serlin, Associate Professor of Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego. He says that the first major leap in prosthetics came after the Civil War which was considered the first modern war.

David Serlin:
The scale of damage from weapons was unprecedented. And so, people hadn’t really seen what prosthetics could do on the kind of the scale that they would soon come to understand.

Roman Mars:
By the end of the war, tens of thousands of soldiers suffered amputations and needed help getting back to their lives. In response, the federal government began subsidizing artificial limbs for Union soldiers and prosthetic companies sprang up to meet the spike in demand.

Vivian Le:
In the process, available prosthetic technology for both veterans and civilians grew exponentially. Prostheses evolved from rudimentary wooden peg legs to artificial limbs that had hinges at the ankles and knees to reproduce a natural gait.

Roman Mars:
Then, decades later, World War II led to even more prosthetic innovation.

David Serlin:
Engineering science, material science, those are all percolating in the 30s and 40s. And they really take off during and after World War II in the Soviet Union and the US and Britain, the development of what we think of as prosthetic science, they really become industries.

Vivian Le:
In the United States, a team of military personnel, engineers, and prosthetists came together at the request of the Surgeon General of the Army to form the Committee on Prosthetics Research and Development. They wanted to figure out how to actually develop prosthetics into a proper field of medicine.

Roman Mars:
And the biggest challenge was developing a good artificial hand. Prosthetic legs are simpler to design and users tend to have higher satisfaction rates with them, but creating a hand that incorporated robotics wasn’t possible until well into the Cold War.

David Serlin:
The 60s and 70s there are all of these engineering sciences that develop, you know, between, let’s say, the military and like MIT or Northwestern. So instead of just developing napalm, they’re also developing technologies that allow you to use batteries for what are called myoelectric arms.

Vivian Le:
A myoelectric arm is a battery-powered prosthesis that can be controlled by movements on the residual limb. In the early 1990s, Britt actually became one of the youngest children in the country to get one.

Britt Young:
I wasn’t the first, but I was part of one of the earliest cohorts of babies basically, using myoelectric hands.

Vivian Le:
At the time, these myoelectric hands were state-of-the-art compared to anything else on the market, but all that Britt’s hand could really do was pinch open and shut. She worked with these devices all the way through middle school.

Roman Mars:
And it was a real crowd-pleaser in the 7th grade.

Britt Young:
It was like a party trick in middle school like, “Hey I can crush a can.” And, you know, that’s fun for a while.

Vivian Le:
But as Britt got older, she realized just how useless her myoelectric hand really was.

Britt Young:
If you think about it, how many tasks in your day do you need, a slow-moving, grinding, clicking thing that will grip in a single motion — more like a pinch. It couldn’t even grab a piece of paper. It would just slide right through.

Vivian Le:
And by the time she got into high school, she was pretty over it.

Britt Young:
This thing doesn’t help me. It’s heavy. And I’m just going to quit. So I went exclusively to passive arms after that.

Roman Mars:
A passive prosthesis, also called a cosmetic prosthesis, is a device that closely resembles a “natural” limb. It doesn’t crush any cans or get you any attention… In fact, it serves the opposite purpose — to help you blend in.

Britt Young:
Something that I had deeply ingrained in me over my lifetime that, like, I needed to wear this or else people are going to treat me differently, they’re going to look at me funny. I need to wear this so that I am undetected and that I can conform and that my life runs smoother.

Vivian Le:
After her bad experience with the myoelectric arm, she had no interest in dabbling in advanced prosthetics anymore. She was resigned to just staying undetected.

Roman Mars:
That is… until a few years ago when her prosthetist reached out…

Britt Young:
They got in touch with me and they said, you know, there’s been a lot of changes in prosthetic arm technology. Things are a lot more sophisticated.

Vivian Le:
In the years since Britt stopped using powered devices, innovation in the field had gone into hyperdrive. These new advancements in prosthetics were driven in the early 2000s by a renewed sense of government responsibility to compensate for the inadequacies in the American healthcare system… No, I’m just kidding — it was because of the military again.

Britt Young:
The Iraq war was a really big turning point in prosthetics in the US, but also in parts of Europe.

Vivian Le:
In 2006, DARPA launched the Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They wanted to address the shortcomings of available prosthetics for veterans with amputations by building the ultimate powered hand that would be sleeker and multi-articulating, meaning the individual digits on the hand could move and form different grip patterns.

Roman Mars:
And this time around, they wanted these new high-tech prosthetics to look… bionic.

David Serlin:
The goal 30, 40 years ago in prosthetics was to make things look realistic and to be able to pass.

Vivian Le:
David Serlin again

David Serlin:
But now, you do tend to see prosthetics that are– the last thing that they’re interested in doing is looking like the “real thing.” They will have articulated fingers or articulated joints, but they’re not looking to mimic the way that the human-like flesh-colored elbow joint or knee joint or finger joints look. In fact, what they look more like are robots out of Star Trek or Star Wars.

Vivian Le:
We’d seen articulating bionic limbs in movies and in comic books for decades, and now it seemed like real-world prosthetics were finally getting closer to our sci-fi dreams.

Britt Young:
We’ve always had sci-fi movies be the standard for what we want in the future, right? There’s just like this turn in, like, okay, what’s possible?

[6 MILLION DOLLAR MAN: GENTLEMAN WE CAN REBUILD HIM. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY.]

Britt Young:
And there seems to be kind of like a weird alignment in the early 2000s where what was potentially possible, technologically started to line up more with like this vision of what is going to be attainable.

[ROBOCOP: “IT’S GOT A HELL OF A GRIP”]

Britt Young:
And that is like perfectly replaceable prosthetic limbs.

[CAPTAIN AMERICA: “YOU HAVE A METAL ARM?! THAT’S AWESOME, DUDE!”]

Roman Mars:
So in 2018, tempted by all of these new advances in the technology, Britt decided to get her first myoelectric prosthesis in over 15 years.

Britt Young:
There was a lot of anticipation that was being built among my friends and myself for what at the time seemed like the coolest, most life-changing, cutting-edge prosthetic arm that I would receive in my life. And I thought it was kind of time to do something really dumb and silly about it.

Roman Mars:
Like throw an arm party.

[AUDIO FROM BRITT YOUNG’S ARM PARTY]

Vivian Le:
She was embracing her cyborg future, and it looked… awesome.

Britt Young:
People were like “sh*t.” Like when I’m wearing a dress, I had like a little heel. And then there’s this, like, stormtrooper, like, very aggressive looking kind of militaristic hand. Like, I look, badass. People love it. They just want to see tricks. They want to see, like, how it moves. It was, I mean, I like the attention and it felt like middle school again.

Vivian Le:
But a lot like when she was in middle school, Britt quickly realized this high-tech piece of machinery wasn’t all that it was hyped up to be. It was heavy. It was hot. It was incredibly uncomfortable. But Britt still practiced with it every day, putting it on and trying to get her body used to the discomfort.

Britt Young:
Maybe it’s sort of like breaking in leather heels or something like, I liked the way this looks and I think I will look sexy. But right now it’s pain and you have to endure the pain.

Roman Mars:
And the pain wasn’t really worth it. The point of assistive technology like prosthetic devices is to assist, but there were a lot of things this multi-articulating hand couldn’t do. Simple things, like turning a doorknob…

Britt Young:
So this thing cannot open a doorknob — turning it. Because that’s a forearm rotation. That’s a wrist rotation. That’s not going to happen.

Vivian Le:
And it wasn’t like she could just make the hand do whatever she wanted, she was limited only to the grips that were pre-programmed on the device.

Vivian Le:
“If you want to do like a thumbs up and then go straight to like a hang ten, how–”

Britt Young:
“No, no. It is multi-articulating, but it is not individually articulating like there are presets and that’s it. I can’t, like, decide to use the middle finger only.”

Vivian Le:
“Aw, that’s not even an option?”

Britt Young:
“No. And also, it’s proprietary, so if you would like to change the grip patterns, you must make an appointment with your prosthetist.”

Roman Mars:
There were actually only a few tasks that her bionic hand was helpful for, like holding an umbrella in one hand and a cellphone in the other at the same time.

Britt Young:
Which now is not a problem because I live in the Bay Area and it never rains.

Vivian Le:
…and it was great for operating a potato ricer on Thanksgiving. Other than that, her $70,000 bionic hand has been kind of bust.

Britt Young:
So I made $70,000 Thanksgiving mashed potatoes. Is it worth it? No.

Vivian Le:
Which brings up another issue with advanced prosthetics — how absurdly expensive they are! Britt was lucky enough to have really good insurance which paid for the bulk of the price, but a complex myoelectric arm can cost anywhere from $20,000-$100,000. And even if you have good insurance, it can be a battle to get insurance companies to pay for even the most basic types of prosthetics, let alone the experimental high-tech kinds.

Roman Mars:
But despite the high financial cost and all of the functionality issues, Britt says a lot of people still choose these types of advanced prosthetics over low-tech options in order to meet other people’s expectations

Britt Young:
It seems like there’s a little bit of an overbearing expectation that, like, if you’re missing a limb, then you need to have a cyborg arm. You need to be bionic because that’s cool. It gets you cool attention.

Vivian Le:
Futuristic prosthetic technologies are exciting and draw a specific type of positive attention. And for a lot of people with limb differences, this attention can seem better than the alternative.

Debi Latour:
When we wear a prosthesis in public, we attract attention. But we’re going to attract attention no matter what. So the person has to decide with what are they more comfortable.

Vivian Le:
This is Debi Latour, she’s an occupational therapist and does educational consulting for prosthetics design. Debi also has a congenital limb difference and occasionally uses a powered hand. She actually really likes hers.

Debi Latour:
It’s invaluable for doing things like typing, and I’m a university professor. I do a lot of bimanual activity.

Vivian Le:
And not using her prosthetic arm can come with its own problems

Debi Latour:
If you’ve ever tried to push a grocery cart with one arm, I would challenge you to do it and be prepared to knock down a display at the end of an aisle.

Roman Mars:
Debi may have a different relationship with her prosthetic hand, but she does agree with Britt that the way that high-tech limbs are viewed by people who don’t have limb differences can be damaging. And a lot of that has to do with how we talk about them.

Debi Latour:
Oftentimes prosthetic technology is viewed as like the savior or the superhero type of thing that’s going to give us all of these benefits. Because it’s a bionic arm, it’s going to give us superhuman capacities. But it’s a process.

Roman Mars:
If you spend too much time on Twitter—like me—or if you watch a lot of local news, then you’ve probably come across a very specific type of viral video about advanced prosthetics. They’re feel-good videos that feature a child with a limb difference being given a new bionic arm with some sort of clickbait-y title…

Britt Young:
Like “Baby receives prosthetic arm, look at their reaction” or “10 year old opens up 3D printed arm for the first time, see how they squeal.”

Roman Mars:
In 2012, a disability rights activist named Stella Young coined a phrase for exactly this type of video — inspiration porn. She specifically used the word “porn” because she sees it as the objectification of one group for the benefit of another.

Britt Young:
The media has always been about prosthetics being, like, savior technologies and, like, feelgood fluff pieces. Look at this disabled kid or look at this disabled adult. And now their life is better because of this tech.

Vivian Le:
You see this a lot in reaction videos of babies hearing for the first time after receiving a cochlear implant too. These stories give people an unrealistic expectation of what advanced prosthetic devices can actually do for users. And they show a very narrow version of what thriving looks like for people with a disability.

Sara Hendren:
All those inspiration stories, all of those pity stories, all of those technology rescue stories, all of those are a way, I think, for us to just cognitively contain differences and we can’t imagine that difference actually might be a form of flourishing.

Vivian Le:
This is Sara Hendren, she teaches design and fine art at Olin College of Engineering. She’s not a fan of these types of videos either. They teach us that the solution to someone having a limb difference is to build them a better hand, or the solution to disability, in general, is to “fix” a body.

Sara Hendren:
The next time we meet somebody who’s blind, the next time we accompany our aging grandparent to the theater, the next time we encounter a person with Down syndrome on the street, we can only think of, “oh, where’s the cyborg rescue for this person?” You know, like, where is the, um, the kind of soft piano music swelling in the background, you know? That kind of narrative. And that is a flattened way of seeing the world.

Vivian Le:
It’s not hard for people interested in building assistive tech to get caught up in this narrative too. Hendren teaches a lot of engineering students and she worries that this type of narrow representation can enforce the idea that high-tech solutions are the only ones that matter.

Sara Hendren:
I say this with love, it is a kind of slam dunk for, like, a young person who was interested in robotics who broadly wants to do good in the world. High-tech prosthetic limbs looks like the center of that Venn diagram. But it can obscure then, what assistive technology could really be.

Vivian Le:
It feels like the temptation for designers is to try and create an amazing new technology that can erase a person’s disability. When maybe the better challenge is to try and design a world that can accommodate people with different types of bodies and different sets of abilities

Britt Young:
We’ve kind of chosen the messier way, which is like trying to make every person who is not “whole,” whole again when we could make kitchen counters or cars more accessible to begin with, that are more adaptable.

Vivian Le:
In Britt’s case, instead of selling her a $70,000 arm that makes it easier for her to use a potato ricer, maybe we can design a potato ricer that’s a little easier for someone with a different type of body to operate

Roman Mars:
A lot of people with limb differences can do tasks better with no prosthesis at all because they’ve developed their own adaptations. And for many others, the lower-tech options are actually a lot more functional. There are things like split hook prostheses, which are super reliable because they have no electronic components and don’t attempt to resemble a hand at all.

Vivian Le:
There are over 2 million people in the United States living with a limb difference, and every single one of those experiences is different. Satisfaction with a prosthetic device can depend on which limb is affected or how many limbs are affected. It can depend on how high or low an amputation might be, or whether or not you were born with it. There is no such thing as one size fits all solution assistive tech, and we need to listen to what people actually need in order to navigate the world.

Britt Young:
I want to make space for, like, critiquing these things because otherwise, then we just have to be grateful all the time for, like whatever gets invented.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
These days Britt doesn’t use her high-tech bionic arm and doesn’t even wear a cosmetic prosthesis anymore.

Vivian Le:
But a couple of times a week she uses an activity-specific device which is a type of prosthetic socket with swappable attachments for things like exercising. It doesn’t try to resemble a natural hand at all, and is much simpler than her bionic hand. She has a clamp attachment so she can do kettlebell swings, and another called a “mushroom” that she uses to do balanced pushups. It’s called that because it looks like a mushroom

Roman Mars:
And it’s not like Britt is anti-technology. Actually, she’s surprisingly optimistic about it.

Britt Young:
I do think that the technology will improve. I do think that there will be better options. And maybe in my lifetime, I’ll get another arm that will help me do the potato ricing a little bit better.

Vivian Le:
But in the meantime… she’s not going to just wait around for the perfect arm to get invented. She’ll keep using her mushroom, and her kettlebell clamp, and sometimes no prosthesis at all. And she’ll continue using all the strategies she’s developed to navigate a world that wasn’t built for her.

Roman Mars:
This story was produced by Vivian Le and edited by Chris Berube and Emmett FitzGerald. When we come back, we have a story about how the world is not actually designed for you… it was designed for the average person.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
Your world has not been designed for you. In large part, it has been designed for the average person. Throughout your education, you’ve been given standardized tests and been graded by how well you perform compared to the average. Building codes, insurance rates, the Dow Jones — all these measurements are based around the concept of an average.

Avery Trufelman:
And it’s okay, we know you’re not average. You’re really special.

Roman Mars:
Oh, thanks, Avery Trufelman.

Avery Trufelman:
Well, I mean it. You’re not average. No one is, not completely. But the concept of average affects us all.

Todd Rose:
Everything seemed to be based around this reference point of average and obviously everything about society is built this way, but I’d never really thought of it until I dug into this new science that we’re part of.

Avery Trufelman:
This is Todd Rose.

Todd Rose:
My name is Todd Rose. I am the director of the Mind, Brain and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Avery Trufelman:
He’s also the author of the book, ‘The End of Average’, but to get to that, first we have to start with the beginning of average, because it wasn’t always a thing.

Roman Mars:
The concept of average as we know it was pioneered by a Belgian mathematician and astronomer named Adolphe Quételet.

Todd Rose:
So Quételet is the person who actually coins the term the ‘average man,’ and in the 1830s, he is actually an astronomer in Belgium.

Avery Trufelman:
Today the way that most people get a handle on any set of numbers is to calculate the average, but in Quételet’s time, astronomers were some of the only people who did this.

Roman Mars:
Basically, averages were a way to compensate for the imprecise tools that astronomers were working with in 1830.

Todd Rose:
If you were trying to time the movement of Saturn, you would etch little scratches on your glass of your telescope, and as soon as it crossed one, you’d start counting, and you’d stop counting after it crossed the other and then you’d write it down. But you can imagine, even if you’re off by a half a second, it’s going to introduce a lot of error. And so they realized if they wanted to make sense of taming the heavens, they needed more precision in their estimates.

Avery Trufelman:
And they realized that if you had, say 10 measurements and they were all slightly different, if you added them together and divided them by 10, you’d get a better approximation of the true measurement.

Todd Rose:
If you just average together our measurements, you’re way more likely to be closer to the truth, right? And you end up getting kind of a bell curve of measurement errors.

Roman Mars:
Quételet was the first to take this tool of astronomers and apply it to people.

Avery Trufelman:
In the early 1840s, Quételet finds a data set of the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers. Quételet added together each of the measurements and divided it by the total sum of the soldiers, and that result, 39-3/4 inches, was one of the very first times a scientist had calculated the average size of a human feature.

Todd Rose:
But he brings with it the idea of truth, that the average chess size is true and that all the individuals are error, that nature is striving for the average soldier.

Roman Mars:
This means the average measurement is the true measurement, the platonic ideal. The perfect Scottish soldier has a chest that is 39-3/4 inches according to Quételet.

Todd Rose:
So he’s the one that decides not only is average mathematically useful, it’s morally the way to think about people, and so he basically finds averages anywhere he can possibly find them, and he just has a field day.

Avery Trufelman:
He measures all kinds of other people and averages them. He creates something called the Quételet Index for measuring ratios of average height and average weight, and actually we still use it today. Just now, it’s called the body mass index or BMI.

Todd Rose:
Quételet would say if you talked about height, everyone if they were optimally fed, if they were under the same environmental conditions, would have been average, so his view was that what you’re striving for is the continual improvement of the average of the group.

Roman Mars:
And it wasn’t all just physical. Quételet combs through various datasets for marriages, murders, and suicides, and calculates the averages for them. He figures out there is such a thing as a normal suicide rate, which is really, really bizarre at the time, almost scandalous.

Todd Rose:
Nowadays when we’re so used to the stability of big massive amounts of data that it’s hard to put yourself in their shoes, but back then, they really thought that something like say suicide was such a personal decision that there couldn’t possibly be any pattern there.

Avery Trufelman:
But suddenly there were patterns of body size, of intelligence, of birth, of death. People became statistics. Their behavior starts to become predictable. Suddenly human life went by the numbers.

Todd Rose:
So obviously the first interpretation is, well, wait a minute, maybe there’s no free will, right? Maybe there’s laws of society just like there’s laws of physics, and so that kick-started a whole bunch of people like Karl Marx who loved Quételet.

Roman Mars:
And Quételet becomes a huge star. In his time, Quételet was up there with the likes of Sir Isaac Newton. His science of averages was this remarkable cutting edge way to assess the health, wellness, and progress of populations.

Todd Rose:
He’s really active in the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, all the way into the ’50s and ’60.

Avery Trufelman:
And the 1860s brings us to the U.S. Civil War and to another super fan of Quételet’s science of averages, Abraham Lincoln.

Todd Rose:
When the Civil War is going in the North, Lincoln actually decides… I mean, they’re kind of getting their butt kicked, frankly.

Roman Mars:
In large part because this war had gotten so huge and unwieldy, Lincoln doesn’t really have a handle on the Northern Army.

Todd Rose:
And he’s like, “Look, we don’t even know who our soldiers are. We don’t know how well fed they are. We don’t know what kind of armor they need. We don’t know anything about them.”

Avery Trufelman:
Lincoln decided that the Union Army needed more information about its soldiers in order to best distribute resources, so he ordered this enormous study to assess the Union Army physically, medically, and mentally.

Roman Mars:
And then in explicit obedience to Quételet’s new science, averages were calculated and reported.

Todd Rose:
They actually say basically we’re following the father of this new field, Quételet.

Avery Trufelman:
These freshly calculated averages informed the distributions of food rations and the design of weapons.

Todd Rose:
For example, if you were going to create muskets, well, how far is the trigger, and you could actually calculate average reach for a soldier.

Roman Mars:
This also affected military uniforms, which used to be all custom sewn, but in the Civil War, so many people had to be outfitted that custom uniforms would be impossibly expensive, so the uniforms had to be mass-produced. But they couldn’t be just all one big floppy size.

Todd Rose:
And so now they’re realizing, ‘oh, well, you know, if we break it into subtypes, there’s a large, and this is what we mean by it, this big of a torso, this broad of shoulders; small, medium, large’, that’s going to carry over into the way they think about the mass production of clothing.

Avery Trufelman:
Yep. The sizes small, medium, and large, which might be on your T-shirt tag, those came out of this massive Civil War study. So you can thank Quételet and Lincoln for that.

Roman Mars:
This study in the Civil War was the basis for the American military’s longstanding philosophy of standardized average-based design.

Todd Rose:
And that’s going to become the fundamental design philosophy from the Civil War forward.

Avery Trufelman:
So in 1926 when the Army was designing its first-ever fighter plane cockpit, engineers measured the physical dimensions of hundreds of male pilots and used this data to standardize cockpit dimensions. Of course, the possibility of female pilots was never considered. Of course.

Roman Mars:
The size and shape of the seat, the distance to the pedals and the stick, the height of the windshield, even the shape of the flight helmets, were all made to conform to the average 1920s male pilot, which changed the way the pilots were selected.

Todd Rose:
You basically would then select people that fit into that and then exclude people that don’t.

Avery Trufelman:
And this cockpit design worked okay up to World War II.

Todd Rose:
What happened was though is that in World War II, it became an Air Force war, right? That was the first time when the Air Force would be the determinant of who was going to win the war, and we absolutely ran out of pilots.

Avery Trufelman:
The government recruited hundreds of new pilots and expanded military aviation. They spent a bunch of money on fancy new planes, although the cockpits were still designed for the average 1920s male pilot.

Roman Mars:
And this new big, bad military force was going to fly the fastest and the highest and be the best.

Todd Rose:
But that’s not what happened. They actually had a pretty massive decline in performance, including just a rash of deaths.

Avery Trufelman:
Pilots were dying all the time. Even after the war ended, just in training, they could not control their planes.

Todd Rose:
It became kind of part of the culture of the Air Force where hey, it’s just really dangerous to fly.

Roman Mars:
No one knew what was going on. Some people thought, well, these ain’t propeller planes anymore. Maybe these new pilots just can’t deal with the new aviation technology.

Todd Rose:
And then they were like, well, maybe you got to train them better, and they did their better training programs and that didn’t work.

Avery Trufelman:
After blaming the pilots, the training programs, and the technology, it finally dawns on them what if it’s the cockpit? Maybe it doesn’t fit us anymore.

Todd Rose:
Their first instinct is to think, we’ve just gotten bigger as a people, so the old average from 1922 is just too small, right? We’re just bigger and badder, and let’s build a better average.

Avery Trufelman:
So in 1950, researchers at Wright Air Force Base in Ohio were tasked with finding this new average, and one of those researchers was a man named Gilbert S. Daniels.

Roman Mars:
Daniels was a Harvard graduate who had written his thesis on the average sizes of his classmates’ hands. He was 23 years old, small, skinny, nerdy, not a military man at all.

Todd Rose:
And he travels all over the country to different Air Force bases, and his job is to take these tape measures and just measure 147 different dimensions of body size. It’s got to be the most tedious job ever.

Roman Mars:
And as Daniels is traveling around from base to base measuring thousands of airmen, he’s realizing this incredible variability from person to person even within this limited demographic of young men.

Avery Trufelman:
As he was measuring hands and legs and waists and foreheads, Daniels kept asking himself, how many pilots were actually average? So he reports back.

Todd Rose:
So he goes to them and says, look, I think there’s a problem with the average, and he says, I just want to do this side study. I want to know if we take the 10 dimensions of size that matter most for design.

Roman Mars:
Like say shoulder with height, chest circumference, sleeve length, etc.

Todd Rose:
How many of these pilots are actually average on all 10 of those dimensions?

Avery Trufelman:
Daniels crunched the numbers, and of the 4,063 pilots, he measured, not a single airman was close to average in all of the 10 dimensions. None.

Todd Rose:
Not one, and it got even worse. If you just used three dimensions of size, less than 5% of the pilots were average on those. So he quickly realizes like, wait, now you know the problem. If you are designing something for an average pilot, it’s literally designed to fit nobody.

Roman Mars:
And in this new era of jet-powered aviation where pilots were making split-second decisions that could be life or death, it really mattered that pilots could reach what they needed to reach in the cockpit. The military sprang into action pretty much right away.

Todd Rose:
For the military to be willing to basically drop generations of design philosophy, right? Because it doesn’t take them more than a few years to just be like you can’t design an average anymore.

Avery Trufelman:
Air force engineers and contractors designed adjustable foot pedals and adjustable helmet straps and flight suits and adjustable seats.

Todd Rose:
You just can’t believe that we were building planes with no adjustable seats. That’s how much faith we had in the average person.

Roman Mars:
Once all the adjustable elements and other design solutions were put into place, pilot performance soared.

Avery Trufelman:
And of course, now we take this for granted that equipment should fit a wide range of body sizes instead of standardized around one average.

Todd Rose:
You wouldn’t buy a car that didn’t have adjustable seats, right? That’s just crazy, and it seeps into there pretty quickly in terms of automobiles, and then you see what’s interesting is the whole idea of ergonomics. That all comes off of this period of time.

Roman Mars:
World War II jump-starts the science of ergonomics, which is not just for office chairs.

Carisa Harris Adamson:
Well, it’s really the study of work is what you could boil it down to, but it really is a matter of matching people’s capacities to the job.

Avery Trufelman:
This is Professor Carisa Harris Adamson, Director of the UCSF/UC Berkeley Ergonomics Program.

Carisa Harris Adamson:
It’s really important not to go with the average a lot of the time. If we want to incorporate, say, a handle into something, well, we’ll look up the anthropometry data and make sure we identify the grip span that we think is best, or if we’re designing a crank and we want it to be at a certain height, then we will go back to the anthropometry data and figure out what makes the most sense to accommodate as much of the population as we can.

Avery Trufelman:
Keeping in mind that in the U.S., most of the measurements we base our designs on still come from the U.S. Army.

Carisa Harris Adamson:
And that’s primarily the source that we use in, say ergonomic books or when we’re designing for the workplace, and what we found is that those numbers are actually all pretty representative today except for weight and abdominal girth.

Roman Mars:
Which is part of why the world is so hard for heavier people to navigate.

Carisa Harris Adamson:
The military might be considered a more fit population than the rest of us.

Avery Trufelman:
So does this mean that military measurements affect the way our cars are designed?

Carisa Harris Adamson:
Absolutely. The measurements of our military personnel over the years affects just about everything.

Avery Trufelman:
Military measurements are the most public and accessible, and they work okay. They’re not perfect, sure, but they’re getting more inclusive.

Carisa Harris Adamson:
They’ve done a really good job in accommodating more of the population given that women are now a very vibrant part of our military force.

Roman Mars:
When the military opted to design for a greater range of people, they designed for a greater range of opportunity. Take, for example, Kim Campbell.

Todd Rose:
She was a fighter pilot and she flew an A-10 Warthog, and it’s worth Googling. It is the baddest looking plane you’re ever going to see.

Avery Trufelman:
That’s Todd Rose again, by the way, helping us tell the story of Captain Campbell.

Roman Mars:
In 2003, Campbell was sent on a mission to assist some Marines who were trying to take a bridge in Iraq. They were under heavy fire, but on her way back, her plane gets shot and she loses all control.

Todd Rose:
She has the option to eject right there and save her life, but then the plane spirals into Baghdad and kills a bunch of innocent people, so she says, I’m not going to do that. She stabilized it, which I don’t even know how you do, and she flies back and then she says, look, I think I can land this plane.

Avery Trufelman:
And she lands the massive, damaged, uncontrollable plane. It’s an incredible heroic feat, really unprecedented. So, of course, Kim Campbell gets awards and distinctions, and she is someone who could have never been one of the best pilots in the world had the military not changed their design philosophy.

Todd Rose:
She’s the beneficiary of a cockpit that’s flexibly designed because she’s like 5’4″ and rail-thin, and doesn’t look anything remotely close to an average-sized pilot.

Roman Mars:
When Kim gets into a cockpit, she has to put the seat all the way up and pull the pedals all the way out, but it fits.

Todd Rose:
This idea of equal fit as the foundation for how we think about real opportunity in society I think has serious consequences for the future of design.

Avery Trufelman:
And this concept that fit makes opportunity, it’s an important one for Todd because he believes that we can design environments and equipment and even entire systems to accommodate more and more people.

Todd Rose:
When we think about how we design environments, in a lot of fields we’ve made some progress around accommodating wider ranges of people, but actually in things like education, we still actually design for this mythical average person under the assumption that if you design something that fit an average person, it would actually fit most people.

Roman Mars:
By re-examining the concept of the average and acknowledging its limitations, we can maybe start to consider other ways of assessing and categorizing test scores or clothing sizes or wellness or happiness or worth. We can pave the way for more people who are outside of the average, because really no one is average.

Roman Mars:
That story was originally produced by 99pi alum, Avery Trufelman back in 2016.

 

———

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivian Le and edited by Chris Berube. Mix and tech production by Ameeta Ganatra. Music by our director of sound Sean Real. Delaney Hall is the Executive Producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.

Special thanks this week to Greg Martino from United Prosthetics. Britt Young is working on a book of essays about tech, the human body, and disability. This episode was inspired by an article that she wrote for Input Mag called: “I Have One of the Most Advanced Prosthetic Arms in the World — and I Hate It.” You can find a link to that on our website.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building– in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.

 

 

Credits

Production

Producer Vivian Le spoke with Britt Young, a geographer and tech writer; David Serlin, Associate Professor of Communication and Science Studies at UCSD; Sara Hendren, Professor of Fine Arts and Design at Olin College of Engineering; Debi Latour, occupational therapist and founder of Single-Handed Solutions. Special thanks to Greig Martino from United Prosthetics.

This episode was edited by Chris Berube.

 

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