Technology for the People: Humanitarian Design, Assistive Devices, and Global Health [9781503650558]

Overview

In recent years, there has been a drive by the biomedical devices industry in North America and Western Europe to design technology specifically for people living in low-resource countries in the Global South. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork across the United States, Switzerland, and Uganda with assistive device makers, engineers, students, healthcare providers, bureaucrats, humanitarian aid organizations, and people living with limb loss, this book challenges the notion that science and technological innovations flow unidirectionally from the Global North to the Global South. It engages with the ways Ugandan engineers attempt to design culturally compatible and socially acceptable devices within the contexts of transnational knowledge infrastructures and social movements.

  Engineers from North America and Western Europe often privilege cost-effectiveness when designing devices for humanitarian initiatives, using cheaper materials and simplifying product design. But people living with limb loss value much more than simplicity and standardization. Sigounas shows how everyday Ugandans resist and subvert these new humanitarian interventions, modifying and designing assistive devices to better create conditions for self-efficacy and human flourishing in their local communities. Assistive technologies are important for how people reconfigure their embodied selves and social relationships after limb loss. By tracking this transformative work, this book interrogates assumptions about what kinds of medical expertise and expert knowledge should determine who is qualified to design new technologies and under what conditions these devices are implemented.