Last year, WebUrbanist‘s founder Kurt Kohlstedt suffered a debilitating injury that his right arm and dominant hand. New everyday challenges led him to research and test existing adaptive designs, and even to evolve new accessible design solutions. Over the course of a year, these experiences set the stage for Adapt or Design, a twelve-part project of 99% Invisible in three acts. The finalization of this endeavor is accompanied by an episode of the same name featuring Roman Mars.

First, the six-article mini-series Single Handed dives into assistive designs for people with one functional hand. Next, the three-article micro-series Broken Plexus explores design hacks and mods that can help with long-term recoveries. Finally, Left to Write is a three-piece set about adaptive writing technologies, including single-handed keyboards and typing systems.

The project name is a play on “adapt or die,” but it also references a recurring post-injury dilemma: whether to adapt, or to design a fix, absent an existing adaptive design solution.

The project logo design is a nod to the current condition of my (Kurt’s) arm, which awkwardly operates a bit like one of those mechanical grabbers in “claw game” arcade machines.

Act One: Single Handed

Adapting to life with one working hand, I used to joke that everything was three times harder and took three times longer in the wake of my injury; except, I wasn’t entirely kidding. But the more I identified and addressed everyday problems, the more I was able to reclaim my time, energy, and life … with the help of assistive design solutions.

Part 1 – Design Adaptations for Living with One Working Hand: After a week in the hospital, getting discharged felt great. But simply swapping a hospital gown for street clothes highlighted unexpected issues.

Part 2 – No-Tie Kits, Lace Locks, & Other Assistive Footwear: Shoelaces present a problem; the solution could be cheap, fast, good – pick two. Shoe-lutions include lace locks and assistive footwear.

Part 3 – Inclusive Left-Sided Apparel Embodies “Found” Design: Before shopping for inclusive apparel, it can pay to look closely at one’s wardrobe for clothes that may work with new tools or modifications.

Part 4 – Pack Hack Reconfigures Roomy Rucksack for Crossbody Carry: Sling and messenger bags lack everyday utility and comfort. Absent off-the-shelf options, a backpack can be hacked for crossbody-style carry.

Part 5 E-Ink Devices & Peripherals Render Reading More Accessible: Many recreational options may be out of reach, but e-readers remain accessible, and can be augmented with add-ons for one-handed use.

Part 6 – Hand Lenders Point Out Adaptive Designs & Unexpected Issues: Sometimes those around us are best situated to spot problems right in front of us. They can be great sources of novel adaptive design ideas.

Act Two: Broken Plexus

As my recovery dragged on, a series of dynamic long-term challenges emerged, involving change over time. Rehabilitation workout sheets stacked up, leading me to create a workbook; issues with orthoses wore on me, provoking interventions; and seasonal changes coupled with mending nerves shaped my shifting wardrobe.

Part 1 – Designing a Recovery Workbook to Work Out Problems: Wrangling exercise sheets can feel like a workout, but organizing in pain can yield tangible gains, even beyond a well-designed workbook.

Part 2 – Adapting Off-the-Shelf Orthoses for Long-Haul Use: Even the best off-the-shelf orthoses can wear on one over time, with emergent pain points that demand imaginative custom interventions.

Part 3 – Threading Sensational Paradoxes of Peripheral Nerve Damage: Nerve damage can feel chaotic at times, dampening some sensations, magnifying others, yet calling for a balanced approach to apparel.

Act Three: Left to Write 

As a writer, my most persistent post-injury dread concerned my ability to pursue this profession (and passion). So I started researching and testing adaptive keyboards for one-handed users, then wound up developing a single-handed typing system for two-handed keyboards — one that I could share with others, and have below!

Part 1 – Adaptive Keyboards & Writing Technologies for Single-Handed Use: Despite the wide range of available designs, one-handed keyboards have various drawbacks that can be dealbreakers for some users.

Part 2 – Designing a Single-Handed Keymap for Half of a Standard Keyboard: Ultimately, I created a new custom typing solution, programmed to enable one-handed touch-typing on a standard two-handed keyboard.

Part 3 – Setting Up a Free One-Handed Touch-Typing System in Minutes: The “KURTY” keymap adds single-handed functionality to QWERTY keyboards in minutes — and it’s free for you to download and use.

Encore! Roman & Kurt Discuss Adapt or Design

For the concluding episode, we were originally planning to talk primarily about adaptive technologies, but the conversation between me and Roman expanded to encompass a broader range of accessible designs.

Postscript: Adapting, Designing, … and Writing

I set out to write a single article about accessible design, to be paired with an episode about one-handed keyboards. As I developed my own adaptive writing solution, however, putting my experiences down on (proverbial) paper became easier … and the scope started to expand. I continue to recover slowly and incrementally from my injury, but am still limited to typing with my non-dominant left hand (and may be forever). So I continue to find my custom keyboard setup useful and hope others who download it will as well.

Meanwhile, I sincerely and deeply appreciate the support I’ve gotten not only from my colleagues, friends, family, and partner, but also from the many WU and 99pi fans who have engaged with and responded to this series. Thank you all!

-= Kurt Kohlstedt

According to photographer Xiaoxiao Xu, the Chinese farmers and other rural hobbyists building flying machines from scratch are not in it for fame or fortune. Mostly working out of their own backyards, these creators are simply trying to find ways to lift themselves up into the air. Some build choppers, others build planes, and others hybrids and experimental aircraft that are tricky to classify.

Xu moved to The Netherlands as a teenager, graduated with a degree in photography, but traveled back to her home country to work on Aeronautics in the Backyards, a book of drawings, photos and stories of these self-taught hobbyists, mainly working on remarkably small budgets and scrounging for scraps and parts.

For the project, Xu traveled across China to speak with and photograph eight different farmer-aeronauts working on different projects. “Some of these aeronauts have worked for decades but never achieved to get airborne,” says Xu. “Although that might sound like a waste of time, they see it differently. For them, the game is not about how far or high they can fly, it’s about pushing their boundaries in order to achieve the impossible. They call it real-life science-fiction.”

One man she interviewed recalled how he got started: “My first aircraft cost me less than 10,000 CNY and all the materials and parts I made to build it were just one-offs, because I knew the first aircraft wouldn’t be perfect and would end up as firewood like the model airplanes I made before. I used the money I earned from the first aircraft to make my second aircraft, Wang Qiang No.2.” Others tell stories of midair stalls and watery crash-landings — the stakes are high when flying.

As for why they do it, the answers vary — one sums the mystery of motivation up well: “I cannot give a reason for why I want to fly. Maybe this is just how human beings evolve: we ride horses, ride bicycles, drive cars, and then fly an airplane. I fly as best I can. It’s my dream, my joy. It’s pretty much my life.”

The board of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District recently voted unanimously to approve a $76 million funding plan for installation of steel-cable nets 20 feet beneath the east and west edges of the bridge that are intended to deter people from leaping to their deaths or catch them if they do.

The net, suspended from posts, will have a slightly upward slope, and will collapse a bit if someone lands in it, making it difficult for the jumper to climb out. The bridge district will deploy a retrieval device to pluck jumpers from the net. But this will not be the first net to span beneath the Golden Gate, which, when it was constructed, was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

When building the Golden Gate Bridge, the lead structural engineer insisted on the installation of a safety net even though its $130,000 cost was deemed exorbitant. Over the four years of its construction, the net saved 19 men, who named themselves the “Halfway to Hell Club.”

The safety measure, however, was not entirely successful — in one case, a catwalk collapsed and a dozen men were plunged into the water, becoming entangled in the net along the way. A few survived, rescued by a crab boat, but ten men died. Today, there’s a plaque on the south western side of the bridge at the entrance to the west sidewalk dedicated to the workers who died that day.

Gerrymandered districts are perhaps the most visible forms of political corruption, dramatically redrawn into implausible shapes to benefit one political part or another. The idea for this font dubbed “Gerry” by Ben Doessel and James Lee explores just how many forms these places are bent into — as it turns out, one can make an entire alphabet out of them.

“To ensure the eroding of democracy isn’t an issue that is lost in the news cycle, our design team from Chicago concocted a creative way to keep our warped voting districts top-of-mind,” says the font’s makers. “What looks like a ‘G’ is really the 4th Congressional district of Ohio, the ‘E’ is actually Missouri’s 6th district, and so on.”

The font, downloadable for free, started with Chicago’s 4th District, which the designers noticed had a distinctive “U” shape. Searching around, they found more and more letters, and realized they could create a full typeface from their discoveries. Since then, gerrymandering has stayed in the spotlight, and Gerry has been used on things like the US constitution. Its hard-to-read letters make it less than ideal for legibility, but that isn’t the point — the message is in the shapes themselves.

Seamlessly connecting realistic facial features with organic architecture, these sculptural works bridge reality and fantasy, natural forms and built scenes blurring scales and dimensions.

Artist Yuanxing Liang, a graduate of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts,deftly connects heads and landscapes — the latter populated with ponds, trees and bridges — in wraparound works.

One of these, Peach Blossom Island (above), was created for the Wonder Festival in Shanghai. It was inspired by the fable of Peach Blossom Dragon Spring, a phantom-dreaming world equally surreal in legend as in the sculpture.

Many of the elements in these works transition with remarkable clarity from human to architectural forms, with windswept hair morphing into tree branches or vegetation-covered hillsides, or crumbling faces breaking into rocky facades. The effect brings the viewer inside the mind of the figure, making it easy to imagine they are lost in thought in the landscapes spilling out all around them.