Adapt or Design

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. 99PI's Kurt Kolstad is our digital director, the co-author of The 99 % Invisible City, and just generally someone who thinks and writes a lot about design. So naturally, assistive design, which is tailored for people with disabilities, has been on his radar. But Kurt's personal relationship with it changed pretty drastically about a year ago, when something happen to transform the way he moves through the world. Kurt recently wrote a series of articles on our website called Adapt or Design about his journey into the world of assistive technology. He's here to talk about the inspiration for that series and about designing his own assistive tech, some of which he now uses every day.

0:48Hey Kurt, thanks for talking to us about this. Hey Roman, yeah, good to be here. So this all started about a year ago when you sustained a pretty serious injury. Can you tell folks what happened? Yeah. Well, I went to bed one night with my partner and the next thing I knew I was wandering around my condo in sort of a daze and I'm not sure how I got home from her place. Like I don't remember like an entirely normal day that I spent with her before that. I just kind of like ended up in this walking dream state and And I was a bit concerned because my my right arm was paralyzed and I couldn't feel anything in that arm.

1:29And so I called my girlfriend at work and she was like, you know, are you OK? And I said, I'm not really sure. And I think that's like a universal signal of like, OK, you're not OK, because if you don't know how to answer that question, that's a bad sign. And so she she immediately came over to my place from work and it was like, we should go to the emergency room. As soon as she saw me and I was like, well, I don't know. Maybe we should get a second opinion. How about we call my dad first? Who is who is not a medical doctor? No, he's a he's he's got a Ph.D. So he's a he's a doctor, you know, a doctor of geophysics.

2:07So he's like a rock doctor. So, yeah, I wasn't exactly thinking straight. Yeah. You know, that was very clear. And so my girlfriend talked over me as I tried to explain things. And she's just like, come here now. We need to go to the hospital. Yeah. And so he did. He came, picked us up and drove us to the hospital. So you went to the hospital, you're talking to some doctors and they're helping you fill in some blanks of this injury. So could you describe what they think happened? Yeah. So there was a lot of mystery and there were a lot of tests. And I ended up staying in the hospital for a full week as they sort of unraveled this puzzle as best they could.

2:43And what they concluded was that I'd had some sort of neuro cardiac event and had wound up unconscious on the floor, lying on top of my arm, which cut off blood flow and ultimately did a ton of damage to my brachial plexus, which is this nerve nexus between your spinal column and your arm. And the nerves all the way down my arm to my fingertips were severely damaged. Yeah. And at this point, was there a notion as to how temporary or permanent your arm paralyzation was going to be? Yeah, it was sort of a slow, slow unfolding because, yeah, I did. I went from thinking, oh, you know, my arm's just like asleep, just like really, really deeply asleep, maybe.

3:33But, you know, nothing's broken and I'm at the hospital. Things are going to be fine. And so like slowly understanding, as they explained things, that like this is not an injury you recover from in days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. Like it is an injury that you may incrementally recover from up to a point, but it's permanent. And so I had to go from thinking of it in terms of being an injury to thinking of it in terms of being a disability. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The reason why I want to talk to you about this and have this be an episode of the show is that you have a mind that is written and thought about design for a very long time, like all your professional career.

4:13You've done it for us for almost 10 years at this point. And this is a world that is designed for two functional arms. And now you put in this situation where all of a sudden the two-handedness or the right-handed dominant two-handedness of the world becomes very, very clear. And so what I'm hoping is you can kind of walk us through the world you encountered when you left the hospital. Yeah. And what I'll say is while I was in the hospital, in my kind of bubble, I mean, I was worried about, you know, things like writing about design, you know, this kind of big picture stuff. But you're right. I mean, as soon as you leave that kind of safe, enclosed, contained space, reality hits like a brick.

4:58And the first thing you notice is in swapping out your hospital robe for your pants and your shirt. Suddenly I'm sitting there with my non-dominant left arm trying to put these things on and figure out like, OK, well, now I've got my phone in my right pocket. I can't even reach that anymore. or it immediately becomes clear that there's a lot of adaptation that's going to need to take place. So what are some of the solutions that you found? How did you deal with your phone being in your right-hand pocket and you can't quite reach it? So I don't have my right pocket sort of accessible anymore, which means I've got half the pocket capacity.

5:40And so what I did was I started pulling things out of that pocket and hooking those things up in different places. So, for example, I took everything out of my wallet and I put it in one of those kind of retractable key card reader things that you use for access to, you know, the bus or the train or your work. So that was good. It got the wallet out of the way. And I took my phone and I put it in this holster, which I could then clip, you know, on the side of my pants. Like everything that I could, I moved somewhere else, keeping it sort of readily accessible, but out of the way at the same time.

6:15And one of the very few advantages of wearing a bunch of different slings early on was I had a lot of places to clip things. One thing that comes to mind as something that is especially difficult to do with one hand is putting on shoes, especially shoes with laces that need to be tied. And it also seems like a weird mental state to be in because the last time you couldn't tie your shoes, you were probably a small child, you know. And so could you talk about how you've managed that particular challenge? Yeah, well, at least for me, all of my shoes are laced. So I went out and I looked for something that would be a sort of prefab, you know, off the shelf, all in one solution.

6:58And I found these lace locking kits and they have these widgets inside that you thread your laces through and then you sort of cinch the widget up and down. It's kind of like cinching up a bolo tie. But then, like, you've got a problem because your laces are no longer being looped and tied, and so they need to be shortened. But once you clip your laces shorter, the ends immediately start to unravel. And so the other part of these kits are these tips that clip onto the end. and they're kind of like big and plastic and ugly and uncanny and so i went out looking for some kind of a more diy subtle solution that wouldn't be quite so loud and so what i ended up doing is uh i bought heat shrink uh thermoplastic tubing which basically like you slot the clipped end of your lace into this and then you know ideally you i think you take like a a heating element or something more official, but I just ran a lighter underneath it, um, to, uh, to sort of cinch it up.

8:10That's a heating element. Yeah. Yeah. It's a heating element. And, um, uh, although I will say one thing I learned from that is, you know, don't try this at home, like, especially when you're one handed, like I'm sitting there, you know, like toying around with a lighter, which is hot and burning my fingers. And it was like an early realization that like, I have one working hand. I cannot afford to jack this thing up, right? Like it's, this is now more vital than ever. But the result is you have these aglets that look like they come sort of straight out of the factory, right? And so that's the thing that, you know, signals to people, hey, I've got normal shoelaces on.

8:50Okay, so you've got lock laces, which are a great way to adapt the shoes that you already have so that they're easier to put on one-handed. But you also looked into some accessible off-the-shelf options. And what you discovered there was that there were some really innovative, creative shoe designs out there. Yeah. So lock laces are fast and cheap. And they're a great way to, you know, make use of your existing footwear. But I did end up getting a pair of specially designed hands-free shoes that basically, like, you pop out of them and they break open in the middle. Like they kind of they like wedge themselves open and you slide your foot out into the air.

9:29And then when you're ready to put them on, you slide your foot in, press your heel down, and it just locks back into place. And what I love about them is partly, you know, how well they work and that they sort of hug your heel. But also there's this kind of rubber band that runs along the side. And that's what locks it into place in both configurations, both open and closed. And so being able to see that structural element, you know, really sort of tickles my design fancy. I love, you know, the kind of honesty and clarity of that design. And I, you know, I think that was part of what drew me to that particular pair.

10:04It's like the central Pompidou of shoes, you know, like all the mechanics are on the outside to show you how the thing works. It's exactly that. It's very expressive in that way. And yet it also looks like a normal pair of shoes. So to the uninitiated, it doesn't look like you're wearing something janky. But if you know what you're looking at, you can see how it works. And that's what I love. So you found a new design in Shoe that you really love. Talk to me about some of the things that you've grown to hate as a person navigating the world with one arm. Yeah. So one of the things that became like the bane of my existence are conventional plastic side sort of clippy buckles.

10:42The kinds that you find on backpacks and, you know, everything else in your life that carries things. And so one of the problems that I discovered was that buckles are really hard to work with and hard to unclick and hard to snap back into place. And, you know, those are everywhere. They're on your backpack. They're on all these different things. But what I found was when I was looking for this strap to keep one of my orthoses in place, which is the sling that kind of kept my limp arm from dangling and just sort of hanging there. I needed something that would basically serve like a sternum strap on a backpack.

11:21And what I found was one that has a magnetic buckle. And once I realized the incredible amazingness of magnetic buckles, I just started putting them on everything. Like I took a bunch of my stuff to the tailor and like had them replace a bunch of things. Wow. I did some of my own. And yeah, and so now everything that can have a magnetic buckle has a magnetic buckle. And what makes a magnetic buckle so amazing is that the force of the magnet pulls it together and you can snap it into place and you can kind of do it all with one hand. You just have to get them close together. Yeah, that's right.

11:56Part of it is like the beauty of being able to unclip it one handed. But really like the master stroke is that it just snaps back into place and the hold is strong. Like once you hear that click, it's like that thing isn't going anywhere. That's a really strong connection because it's like both a magnetic and a mechanical connection. Like the magnet brings it into place. And then once it snaps, it's like you need to mechanically unfasten it to get it free. That's awesome. I mean, it seems to say that most of the world is harder to navigate, obviously, with one arm versus two. But also through your injury, you've discovered that some of the world is accidentally, you know, kind of works for a left handed person or one working left arm person.

12:41Yeah, I've become sort of fond of saying that the world is designed for two handed people first, right handed people second and left handed people last. And in most cases, that's the case. But weirdly, like when I was kind of gearing back up to like trying to drive again, which was, you know, scary, a scary thought. And like I was going to, you know, go off into a side road, you know, like roll around a parking lot, try to figure it out. And as soon as I got behind the wheel and sort of got myself into position and started, I realized like, oh, this is actually like surprisingly easy because I grew up using a stick shift.

13:17But these days, your right hand doesn't have a lot to do. It's like the kind of tertiary functions of like windshield wipers and things. Sure. But that's about it. the left hand is what controls things like the blinkers and like you know the the headlights and all of that stuff so driving around left-handed is actually not that bad yeah um which which i was not really expecting but it's one of those things you only discover through trying right yeah yeah it's so surprising to me because it's totally true but like we created so much of the design in the car based on the fact that you know changing gears is difficult and is you know better used for your right hand mostly.

13:57I mean, and you're doing it constantly. You have to like, that's like, that's where the control comes from, right? Is like that gear shifting up and down. It's this regular thing. And then when it's gone, it leaves this void of opportunity, right? Yeah. So it's so, so funny to me that, that cars might be one of those things that is just sort of accidentally designed for, for left-handed people, at least in the, in the U S and all right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of caveats, but yes, like, like it is absolutely the case that like when I am driving, It's like one of the few, if not the only time when I'm like, okay, thank goodness that it is my right hand that doesn't work and not my left.

14:32That is not normally the case.

14:39After the break, Kurt talks about the surprisingly difficult task of finding the perfect one-handed keyboard.

14:53I'm back with 99PI's Kurt Kolstad. Kurt, we've talked about some of the ways you've designed around various challenges following your injury, but we haven't yet talked about one of your most personal obstacles, which is the ability to write. So you are a design journalist. It is your job to write. I know that is your great joy to write, but typing one-handed is incredibly arduous, probably more so than most people realize. Yeah, the thing that I realized very quickly, and I kind of knew even before I tried it, was that the process of writing isn't just, you know, typing out keys and like, you know, hitting letters that make words and things.

15:32It's like constantly re-editing yourself and like doing all of this on the fly and at speed and jumping between the mouse and the keyboard. So, yeah, it's safe to say that that was like, in many ways, my biggest concern. Big picture. So I want to talk about speech to text because speech to text has gotten quite advanced in the last few years. And I've seen you use it on Slack. But you've said that this is not something that works for you as a writer in a more general sense. Can you talk about that? Well, the reality is I do use it. Like it's part of my sort of kit of tools for writing and other things.

16:07Like it's great for texting. It's great for emails. But if you didn't know this already about me, I'm a bit of a rambler. So when it comes to writing and like my particular process, like I spend a lot of time going over things and refining and editing on the fly. And so for me personally, it leads me down this dangerous path of just being verbose, which I am verbose enough in my everyday life. But one of the things I've learned is that different things work for different people and it all kind of works together in the end. Yeah. So companies do make keyboards specifically designed for one hand.

16:45I know that you got kind of obsessed with trying these out. Can you describe some of your process of learning about one handed keyboards? Yeah, yeah. Well, even before I kind of got to those, I really, you know, I looked for ways to do it on a normal keyboard, right? To like write one-handed. But, and what I discovered is there are touch typing systems for doing that, but you move your hand so much, it really subjects you to extra stress. And so it really quickly became apparent that if I was going to stay a writer, I needed a one-handed hardware solution that was really designed for this to minimize hand movement.

17:21So I did a bunch of research, as one does. Well, as you do. I don't know, as one does, necessarily. But go ahead, continue. Yeah, yeah. I dove very, very, very deep into this. And I kind of looked at everything in existence. So what are some of the highlights of the things that you found? Well, I basically narrowed it down to like three choices and they all were surprisingly different. Like it's not like a two handed keyboard where like everything is kind of the same, just like with tweaks and mods. Like we're talking totally different layouts and interfaces. And so before I could really decide, like I'm going to get one of these, especially because they're really expensive.

18:01Yeah. I was like, I have to try them. And they also, you know, they're not sitting out at Best Buy. You have to get them somehow. So the first step for me was finding this great adaptive tech library here in Minnesota, which loans these things out for free, like a normal library, except a normal library that lends out things that are worth like thousands of dollars. So yeah, they sent me these keyboards that I requested, and I started using them and seeing how they worked. That's an incredible service. I mean, every few days I am like wowed by the importance and the sort of great innovation of libraries.

18:40And that's just that's just stunning. OK, so they sent you a few keyboards to try some very expensive keyboards that you'd have to special order. What did you find? Well, so I started with this one that's sort of like the Buick of one handed keyboards. It's like this vintage giant 1970s clunker and it's called the Maltron. And it's made by this company that sort of really made a splash in ergonomic design early on, like when that wasn't really a thing, by curving their keyboards. And they started with a two-handed design and quickly moved to this really kind of sculptural, very provocative looking one-handed design.

19:19You showed me the Maltron. The Maltron is curved in this way that it has this concave bowl of keys. So you sort of set your hand inside of the bowl. and from that vantage point you can sort of reach more keys with your hand in one position. Exactly, exactly. Because like on a flat surface, right, you have to sort of move your hand about, but it's like if you are just hovering your hand and you can flick your fingers in three dimensions, like having that bowl shape is really awesome and it makes things a lot more accessible. But I think what really kind of killed it for me was that only about half the keys are even in that bowl.

19:54Like the alphabet is there. and some of the basic modifier keys like shift and control are there. But there are a bunch of keys, about half, that are on these flat surfaces outside the bowl. So while your hand is in there, it can reach all the keys very easily. But once you lift it out, you have to move it around a lot. And I'm not sure in the end if I ended up moving my hand less or more while using this. Than a conventional keyboard. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So the Maltron didn't work for you. Another one that you have mentioned to me is called the tippy. That's shaped like a slice of pie. What lessons about one hand typing did you learn about the tippy?

20:31Yeah, well, like that shape is really nice. It's like if you splay out your fingers and trace a shape around that sort of flat palm of yours, that's kind of the shape of this board. And that means you can essentially reach everything without anything but a little bit of wrist movement, which is great. Minimal movement, awesome. And like one of the clever tricks that they employed was sort of pushing certain keys off to the periphery that were less important and making the core keys that are like right under your hand serve more functions. So like letters, instead of just being like a letter key that generates either a small or a cap version of a letter, it might also generate a number.

21:12And so if you press down a key, you can access this additional layer of functions in that, you know, most accessible part of the board. Yeah. So you're moving your hand less, but keys take on more functions by using like alt keys and shift keys and stuff people are familiar with. This also required a steep learning curve. And so you decided this was not for you. Yeah, honestly, learning a whole new keyboard layout and a whole new set of specialized keys using only my non-dominant hand, it really got to be a bit overwhelming, to be honest. I can imagine that. And of course, that doesn't mean that this is a bad design.

21:53I suspect Tippy could work great for somebody who is young and starting from scratch. You know, somebody who's not burdened by both having to unlearn one system and then learn another system at the same time. Yeah, which leads us to one of the designs for one-handed keyboards that you liked the best, which is the half QWERTY. Could you describe what a half QWERTY keyboard is? Well, as the name suggests, it is kind of like half of a QWERTY keyboard, almost as if you just cut one in half and kept the left side only. Right. So I'm looking at a picture of it now and it's really small, like maybe half or even a third the size of a standard QWERTY keyboard.

22:35And like you said, the main keys on this thing are the ones that you'd find on the left side of a standard keyboard minus the numbers and some of the modifier keys. Right, right. Exactly. And so the design is made to tap into our muscle memory, our ability to sort of brain body connect with different parts of the keyboard as we touch type. And it's a little hard to picture at first, but just imagine drawing a line down the center of a normal two handed keyboard and then folding that keyboard in half from right to left along that line. It's like closing a book. And so now every letter on the right matches up with a letter on the left and is layered on top of that letter.

23:18And then to access that next layer, you have to press a modifier key. So, for example, the Q key is in the far upper left and the P key is in the far upper right. But when you hold down this modifier key, in this case, the space bar, it changes the Q into a P. It's like when you hold down the shift key to get a capital letter. Right. And from there, you can kind of generalize the rest of them. They're all mirrored in that same way. And if this sounds like a little hard to follow and you're having trouble picturing it, that's actually not really a problem because you're not meant to picture it and you're not meant to remember where these things are in spatial relationship to one another.

23:59You're meant to remember them with your fingers. And it's that mind-body connection that frankly shocked me with its efficacy. Like, I could not believe how quickly my left hand learned to type things on the right side because I was using the same fingers and the same kinds of motions as I was used to using just as, you know, in a mirror image form. Got it. Okay. So if you hit the Q with your pinky, The other pinky is for the P, which is all the way across the board. And you're basically keeping that consistent in favor of keeping it kind of like in the same relative position on the board. That is fascinating to me.

24:42Yeah, it is really fascinating and a bit magical and really awesome when it comes to the letter keys. But the problem is because you have this tiny board, you have to cram all of these other functions in from other places too. Like the mirror only gets you at most, you know, two punctuation marks, generally just one letter, you know, from the right side. But these keys have as many as six different symbols. So, for example, the Q key gets you to the P key really easily. But you also need it to get you to the right parentheses, the exclamation point, the hyphen, and it also serves on top of all of that as your delete key.

25:31So those parts became much harder to learn. And the reality is you have to remember all of these different combinations. And there's no safety net. There's no backup plan. Like, at least on, you know, a full keyboard, you can just hunt and peck around if you forget how to do some convoluted thing. But on this, you can't. You're just stuck and have to look it up. So you got all these keyboards from the library, and I'm sending a donation right away as soon as this is over. But in the end, what did you choose for writing and to facilitate your career as a writer? Well, so I went into this thinking like, okay, I want an off-the-shelf solution, right?