Design for Human Agency: My TEDx Talk
After my right arm was amputated, I began building prosthetics. At TEDxRTC, I shared why the hardest lesson was learning that my experience alone could never tell me what someone else needed.
In 2018, my right hand was amputated after a bus accident.
After surgery, I was told I would never hold a camera again. As someone who had studied visual communication, that statement reached beyond my injury. Someone else was deciding what my future could look like.
That experience became part of the reason I co-founded Symbionic.
At TEDxRTC, at Rathinam Technical Campus in Coimbatore, I shared the journey that followed, including a mistake I needed to acknowledge.
For five years, we worked on building a high-tech bionic arm. I was a prosthetic user myself, and I assumed that gave me an understanding of what other people needed.
But my experience was still only one person’s experience.
I could understand what it meant to lose an arm without knowing what mattered most to every person living with that loss. Their work, routines, priorities and choices could be very different from mine.
That changed the question behind our work:
How do we give people more control over their own lives?
That is what I mean by designing for human agency. The freedom to decide what you want to do, which support works for you, and what your next step should be.
For us at Symbionic, this means involving the people who use our products in the decisions that shape them. It means listening, questioning our assumptions and being willing to change what we build.
Thank you to the organisers, faculty and students of Rathinam Technical Campus for giving this story a stage.
Watch the full TEDx talk below.