I really dislike attitudes like the author's. I think it's great and important that people and companies spend considerable amounts of their time and money exploring the limits of design and what's possible, even if the concepts produced have little direct, practical use today. That kind of speculative R&D can lead to great things and who knows, maybe in 20 years it will lead to something amazing that will benefit a great deal of people.
Trying to pooh-pooh the ideas of tomorrow because they don't immediately solve all the problems of today is just terrible, short-sighted thinking.
And on a more pedantic note, obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all. What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".
And a crab chair is a pretty good idea honestly. Sure wheels are cheaper and easier, but you can’t go many places with wheels. The crab chair could take you up normal stairs, lift you up to your bed, walk on sand or rough terrain.
You are mischaracterising the author who would love one. They said:
these kinds of prototypes are built to inspire and show what is possible, not to be mass produced for actual users
The links within the article point to better examples of people designing without caring about usability.
I spent a lot of time looking for better equipment for my mum. There's so much dangerous or unusable mobility tech out there, that is often unaffordably expensive. You usually need to buy new, because the second-hand market is abysmal, and customisation is often critical.
Rollator designs with good wheels and working brakes were what I struggled most to find. Most designs couldn't handle basic needs. Wheelchairs were a nightmare - I was just fortunate she only needed one very occasionally.
I think their point is they worry too much time and money is going into cool concepts like this and not enough on practical steps forward in mobility that can actually make a difference in people's lives within a few years.
The author even gives a concrete example
> 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.
That doesn't sound like a wild concept, sounds like something achievable as a product if there was someone with deep pockets willing to chuck in the money (I doubt mobility aids are a great money spinner, money back with a bit of profit should be feasible?) and some good engineers enthused by making a real difference to people.
How much money and engineering time did Toyota spend on this I wonder?
If that's a drop in the bucket compared to the practical, creating real product, engineering happening in this space then it's all good. If most of the money is going to stuff like this then that's a problem.
I agree that the concept product space is exciting and important. It is good to see people and companies explore these spaces and ideas. Sure lets build and play with these things.
The criticism that is levied on these things is not that they exist but that despite the glitz and shine they are not going to help today. 20 years is a long time to wait for your fancy mobility device.
I have seen countless concepts that never see in the real world. 100 mpg cars, stair climbing wheel chairs, exoskeletons etc. I am watching for thing that I can afford and use now.
Could not agree more. Attitudes like the authors are incredibly destructive to society. Essentially all gains to human life satisfaction have come from tech innovation.
Agreed. Just goes to show that people have no idea how R&D works. You have to build the thing before you can discover if it's possible or not. If no one built stuff like this, you would never get improvements to your existing consumer-grade mobility devices. All breakthroughs look like longshots before they're real.
> obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all
That is giving too much credit to the myth of consumer agency and free choice in the marketplace.
The truth is more complex than that: while consumers can ask for stuff and demand changes and make stuff happen sometimes, companies will usually be the ones making markets, and creating a brand image, around things that are profitable and realistic for them to make.
I was telling my parents the other day, that probably most cosmetics were started when a trader got 3 cartloads of some industrial chemical that he couldn't unload on the buyers anymore. Like "oh gosh all this powdered lead will go to waste, unless I convince all the patrician Roman women to smear it on their eyelids!!" Or, "subsidized corn gave us so much cornstarch capacity that we need to villainize talc, which was originally a useless byproduct of mining minerals like uranium and gold!"
And it is really true, at least in a minority of documented case studies, because if you go look up the history of Heathkit and the D.I.Y. electronics industry, it turns out that Heathkit was founded when several train cars were loaded with military-surplus electronics parts. And they were assorted parts that couldn't meaningfully be assembled into commercial products, and the seller couldn't unload all this postwar surplus, so the guy owning the cargo came up with the D.I.Y. idea really fast. And he put in work to write educational instruction manuals and make a market to veterans and young men who aspired to a career in electronics and E.E., like my father, (just a hobbyist).
So I believe there are opportunistic elements to market-making and there are ways for companies to sort of "simulate" consumer demand for things we didn't know we wanted. There are things we want that aren't on the market today. There are features we want that aren't in software. Look all around. The products serve the makers, ultimately, and as for consumers, we'll need to do what we're told.
Yeah -- that's fair; you're right to call me out on that, and you've offered a charitable interpretation of comments.
Ctrl + F "ask" in the article: Ian Ruder writes "All I ask ... Lord knows we don't need ..." so it seems the article is written from a consumerist perspective. We reject consumerism and individualism as preached by New Mobility, Y Combinator, or their partners.
Ian Ruder loves Star Wars and Lego. Perhaps in an alternate reality, Mr. Ruder would be building autonomous Lego Mindstorms Crab Chairs with his wife and sons.
What are they going on about? I showed this to my seven year old who is wheelchair bound and she asked me when she’s getting her robot legs. She’d absolutely love to have a crab leg chair that could get her up and down the stairs without having to transfer from her wheelchair to her stair lift. Move up and down a little so she could reach something out of a cabinet instead of having to ask big sister or mom and dad for help a hundred times a day.
You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?
The author says exactly that in the essay, that if they could get a crab chair tomorrow they would be the first in line.
His point is that these sorts of designs are never going to be practical and that he wishes they would put some of this energy into designing the practical next steps for mobility assistance, that focus on the things the community actually needs.
That’s the entire point though: to reach that design peak, you first gotta climb the mountain. What is the author’s proposition? We ought to skip a bunch of steps on the R&D ladder so he can get new products faster? This isn’t Samsung just vomiting phone designs hoping something will stick, this is far more important than that. Research is essential. Exploration is essential. Speculation is essential. Things like these take time and many iterations to perfect.
We don't have to guess what the author's proposition is. He says it in the last few paragraphs:
> 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.
I think the author is understandably frustrated about seeing a lot of fanfare for sexy prototypes years or decades from the market, when he struggles every day with flaws in his actual mobility devices that could be improved in months if the manufacturers cared enough to do it.
The author is misguided in blaming the crab chair engineers for this state of affairs. The crab chair engineers aren't responsible for the myriad socioeconomic inefficiencies that make wheelchairs suck today. If they didn't work on crab chairs, they'd work on some other artsy project, and we still wouldn't have better wheelchairs. But everyone in this thread needs to chill out and stop being so personally offended that this writer is holding back human progress by not ass-kissing the crab chair.
Similar to "concept cars", these kind of things are never really made to be built. It's unfortunate if that sometimes takes attention away from actually making a better product.
I didn't before, but now it exists I want one. And I have (mostly) working legs.
Though I do wonder if it would be more stable with more legs (6 perhaps), as natural crabs have, as a four leg design will result in a lot of time when the centre of mass is in an inconvenient place with respect to the three legs currently on the ground (I'm assuming it moves slowly enough that it is rare more than one leg is raised). Unless the technicalities of more legs would make it worse in ways less convenient than the balance bonus.
You can see it jerk up and down when one of the legs takes the load.
When one leg is moving the load is held on the other three, and if you define a triangle by the foot contact points, one side will bisect the center of gravity. That’s not a recipe for stability, but it probably helps with agility. What these design benefit from is lateral movement of the legs, but this one seems pretty stiff.
> They’re over-designed, cost prohibitive and generally out of touch with the realities facing most would-be users. ... Unfortunately, they very rarely translate into real world benefits for people like us.
Shortly before the Solo Stove came onto the market, I met some of the inventors at Maker Fair in Menlo Park, CA. They were part of a group that was trying to engineer a low-smoke stove for indigenous women who spent most of their time cooking.
Instead, the women didn't use it but the men used it in the evening to stay warm.
I have a couple of Kelly Kettles (portable rocket-stoves), and one is for water and the other is for sand. The sand-filled one is a heat battery - charge it up after boiling some water with the other one, and bring it in the tent to keep things positively toasty.
“we should never try building new things because they get peoples hopes up” this is such a moronic attitude to have that seems more and more common. its the harrison bergeron-ification of the world
The (literal in this case) crab bucket mentality is very common among the disability lobbies. This is not likely the first or even the second time most people in this thread have encountered this attitude.
There is often a great big gap between what is available (meets basic requirements) and what is possible (crabchair). It is the space that is to boring for large companies to bother with.
This chair is amazing! It's giving Phantom Menace Viceroy Nute Gunray. It's true though, nobody asked, and wheelchairs are probably better. Unless it can gallop at 30mph. And then I definitely DO NEED THIS!
At some level of rich, it is necessarily true you are a self involved asshole. People who aren't assholes find ways to avoid becoming that rich.
I'm not talking about your $500k/year white collar senior engineer. But at some point in the XY millions a year bracket, you can have it all and everything on top of that is kinda assholish.
This author has a very bad attitude - he seems to understand that this is not meant for mass production, but is more of an engineering showpiece, and for some reason this fills him with rage. How does he think that technology progresses?
I really dislike attitudes like the author's. I think it's great and important that people and companies spend considerable amounts of their time and money exploring the limits of design and what's possible, even if the concepts produced have little direct, practical use today. That kind of speculative R&D can lead to great things and who knows, maybe in 20 years it will lead to something amazing that will benefit a great deal of people.
Trying to pooh-pooh the ideas of tomorrow because they don't immediately solve all the problems of today is just terrible, short-sighted thinking.
And on a more pedantic note, obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all. What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".
And a crab chair is a pretty good idea honestly. Sure wheels are cheaper and easier, but you can’t go many places with wheels. The crab chair could take you up normal stairs, lift you up to your bed, walk on sand or rough terrain.
You are mischaracterising the author who would love one. They said:
The links within the article point to better examples of people designing without caring about usability.I spent a lot of time looking for better equipment for my mum. There's so much dangerous or unusable mobility tech out there, that is often unaffordably expensive. You usually need to buy new, because the second-hand market is abysmal, and customisation is often critical.
Rollator designs with good wheels and working brakes were what I struggled most to find. Most designs couldn't handle basic needs. Wheelchairs were a nightmare - I was just fortunate she only needed one very occasionally.
I think their point is they worry too much time and money is going into cool concepts like this and not enough on practical steps forward in mobility that can actually make a difference in people's lives within a few years.
The author even gives a concrete example
> 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.
That doesn't sound like a wild concept, sounds like something achievable as a product if there was someone with deep pockets willing to chuck in the money (I doubt mobility aids are a great money spinner, money back with a bit of profit should be feasible?) and some good engineers enthused by making a real difference to people.
How much money and engineering time did Toyota spend on this I wonder?
If that's a drop in the bucket compared to the practical, creating real product, engineering happening in this space then it's all good. If most of the money is going to stuff like this then that's a problem.
I agree that the concept product space is exciting and important. It is good to see people and companies explore these spaces and ideas. Sure lets build and play with these things.
The criticism that is levied on these things is not that they exist but that despite the glitz and shine they are not going to help today. 20 years is a long time to wait for your fancy mobility device.
I have seen countless concepts that never see in the real world. 100 mpg cars, stair climbing wheel chairs, exoskeletons etc. I am watching for thing that I can afford and use now.
Could not agree more. Attitudes like the authors are incredibly destructive to society. Essentially all gains to human life satisfaction have come from tech innovation.
If you read the article, you'd know the author is in favor of tech innovation.
Saying you are in favor of tech is just wind if you think people should be scolded for inventing a new thing you don't like
Agreed. Just goes to show that people have no idea how R&D works. You have to build the thing before you can discover if it's possible or not. If no one built stuff like this, you would never get improvements to your existing consumer-grade mobility devices. All breakthroughs look like longshots before they're real.
> What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".
no what they mean is that the average disabled consumer did not ask for the crab chair
I think what the author was saying is "Nobody who actually uses wheelchairs asked for a crab chair."
Obviously someone commissioned these designers to dona crab chair.
> obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all
That is giving too much credit to the myth of consumer agency and free choice in the marketplace.
The truth is more complex than that: while consumers can ask for stuff and demand changes and make stuff happen sometimes, companies will usually be the ones making markets, and creating a brand image, around things that are profitable and realistic for them to make.
I was telling my parents the other day, that probably most cosmetics were started when a trader got 3 cartloads of some industrial chemical that he couldn't unload on the buyers anymore. Like "oh gosh all this powdered lead will go to waste, unless I convince all the patrician Roman women to smear it on their eyelids!!" Or, "subsidized corn gave us so much cornstarch capacity that we need to villainize talc, which was originally a useless byproduct of mining minerals like uranium and gold!"
And it is really true, at least in a minority of documented case studies, because if you go look up the history of Heathkit and the D.I.Y. electronics industry, it turns out that Heathkit was founded when several train cars were loaded with military-surplus electronics parts. And they were assorted parts that couldn't meaningfully be assembled into commercial products, and the seller couldn't unload all this postwar surplus, so the guy owning the cargo came up with the D.I.Y. idea really fast. And he put in work to write educational instruction manuals and make a market to veterans and young men who aspired to a career in electronics and E.E., like my father, (just a hobbyist).
So I believe there are opportunistic elements to market-making and there are ways for companies to sort of "simulate" consumer demand for things we didn't know we wanted. There are things we want that aren't on the market today. There are features we want that aren't in software. Look all around. The products serve the makers, ultimately, and as for consumers, we'll need to do what we're told.
You're not taking it literally enough. Obviously some investor or executive asked for a crab chair.
Yeah -- that's fair; you're right to call me out on that, and you've offered a charitable interpretation of comments.
Ctrl + F "ask" in the article: Ian Ruder writes "All I ask ... Lord knows we don't need ..." so it seems the article is written from a consumerist perspective. We reject consumerism and individualism as preached by New Mobility, Y Combinator, or their partners.
https://newmobility.com/author/iruder/
Ian Ruder loves Star Wars and Lego. Perhaps in an alternate reality, Mr. Ruder would be building autonomous Lego Mindstorms Crab Chairs with his wife and sons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Plot
Flagged for AI writing
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What are they going on about? I showed this to my seven year old who is wheelchair bound and she asked me when she’s getting her robot legs. She’d absolutely love to have a crab leg chair that could get her up and down the stairs without having to transfer from her wheelchair to her stair lift. Move up and down a little so she could reach something out of a cabinet instead of having to ask big sister or mom and dad for help a hundred times a day.
You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?
The author says exactly that in the essay, that if they could get a crab chair tomorrow they would be the first in line.
His point is that these sorts of designs are never going to be practical and that he wishes they would put some of this energy into designing the practical next steps for mobility assistance, that focus on the things the community actually needs.
That’s the entire point though: to reach that design peak, you first gotta climb the mountain. What is the author’s proposition? We ought to skip a bunch of steps on the R&D ladder so he can get new products faster? This isn’t Samsung just vomiting phone designs hoping something will stick, this is far more important than that. Research is essential. Exploration is essential. Speculation is essential. Things like these take time and many iterations to perfect.
We don't have to guess what the author's proposition is. He says it in the last few paragraphs:
> 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.
I think the author is understandably frustrated about seeing a lot of fanfare for sexy prototypes years or decades from the market, when he struggles every day with flaws in his actual mobility devices that could be improved in months if the manufacturers cared enough to do it.
The author is misguided in blaming the crab chair engineers for this state of affairs. The crab chair engineers aren't responsible for the myriad socioeconomic inefficiencies that make wheelchairs suck today. If they didn't work on crab chairs, they'd work on some other artsy project, and we still wouldn't have better wheelchairs. But everyone in this thread needs to chill out and stop being so personally offended that this writer is holding back human progress by not ass-kissing the crab chair.
>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.
So you're asking for a crab chair?
Jokes aside, yeah, it's expensive and likely impractical, but exploring the solution space is what this prototyping is for
Similar to "concept cars", these kind of things are never really made to be built. It's unfortunate if that sometimes takes attention away from actually making a better product.
It's art. Not everything is optimization problem.
It’s speculation. Entirely different.
A billion different ideas could be spawn off of the crab chair even if the chair as a unit never makes it to market.
Why do so many of the demo videos of this crab chair show no people sitting on it? Is this chair not for sitting?
I didn't before, but now it exists I want one. And I have (mostly) working legs.
Though I do wonder if it would be more stable with more legs (6 perhaps), as natural crabs have, as a four leg design will result in a lot of time when the centre of mass is in an inconvenient place with respect to the three legs currently on the ground (I'm assuming it moves slowly enough that it is rare more than one leg is raised). Unless the technicalities of more legs would make it worse in ways less convenient than the balance bonus.
You can see it jerk up and down when one of the legs takes the load.
When one leg is moving the load is held on the other three, and if you define a triangle by the foot contact points, one side will bisect the center of gravity. That’s not a recipe for stability, but it probably helps with agility. What these design benefit from is lateral movement of the legs, but this one seems pretty stiff.
> They’re over-designed, cost prohibitive and generally out of touch with the realities facing most would-be users. ... Unfortunately, they very rarely translate into real world benefits for people like us.
Shortly before the Solo Stove came onto the market, I met some of the inventors at Maker Fair in Menlo Park, CA. They were part of a group that was trying to engineer a low-smoke stove for indigenous women who spent most of their time cooking.
Instead, the women didn't use it but the men used it in the evening to stay warm.
I have a couple of Kelly Kettles (portable rocket-stoves), and one is for water and the other is for sand. The sand-filled one is a heat battery - charge it up after boiling some water with the other one, and bring it in the tent to keep things positively toasty.
Sounds like it was considered useful, but in a way that inconveniently didn’t line up with the investor pitch.
“we should never try building new things because they get peoples hopes up” this is such a moronic attitude to have that seems more and more common. its the harrison bergeron-ification of the world
Companies aren’t going to want to interact with this demographic at all if this is the response to a cutting-edge tech demo.
Pretty weird to blame "this demographic" for a single disabled guy writing a mildly critical article!
The (literal in this case) crab bucket mentality is very common among the disability lobbies. This is not likely the first or even the second time most people in this thread have encountered this attitude.
It is also missing a foot rest.
There is often a great big gap between what is available (meets basic requirements) and what is possible (crabchair). It is the space that is to boring for large companies to bother with.
edit: It does have a foot rest. I did not see it on this page but it is shown on the designboom link in the article. https://www.designboom.com/technology/autonomous-wheelchair-...
It does have a retractable foot rest.
The weird part is that the author actually does want a crab chair. He gushes about how awesome it would be.
His real gripe is that the bleeding edge prototype is too expensive.
This chair is amazing! It's giving Phantom Menace Viceroy Nute Gunray. It's true though, nobody asked, and wheelchairs are probably better. Unless it can gallop at 30mph. And then I definitely DO NEED THIS!
Carcinization applied to furniture strikes me as nicely whimsical.
You try to sit down on a chair and it walks away, leaving you to fall on your butt. Laugh track plays.
At some level of rich, it is necessarily true you are a self involved asshole. People who aren't assholes find ways to avoid becoming that rich.
I'm not talking about your $500k/year white collar senior engineer. But at some point in the XY millions a year bracket, you can have it all and everything on top of that is kinda assholish.
Just like nobody asked for an iPhone.
Innovators gonna innovate. 99 times out 100 they miss the mark. Telling people not to innovate though?
Nobody asked for it because nobody knew a crab chair was an option! Now I don’t need my legs to get a coffee?? Sign me up.
My legs work fine and I want a crab chair!
This author has a very bad attitude - he seems to understand that this is not meant for mass production, but is more of an engineering showpiece, and for some reason this fills him with rage. How does he think that technology progresses?
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” - Henry Ford
Exchange that 'b' for a 'p' and the message will get through.
Nobody asked for phone with only 1 button in 2007 too.
And now we only have phones with one button.
multiple articles talk about it climbing chairs, but there's no video of that - is it really capable of doing so?
One crab chair, please!
One step closer to Wall-E.
Low-key want.
Well nobody asked for this author’s opinion, yet here we are having to digest it.
Now we can all ride around like Nute Gunray:
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mechno-chair/Legends
Or that guy from the Wild Wild West movie.
Want
I asked for a crab chair, and I'm not even disabled.
I don't get why "wearable chair" from Silicon Valley (HBO) didn't catch on.
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dang: can we change the link to an article not written by someone with an aggressively anti-hacker attitude?
https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/bizarre-robo...
The article is not really anti hacker (IMHO) just lets not forget the here and now.