By MATTHEW HOLT
There’s a new world emerging of customizable materials and it’s being led in health care by designers like my old friend Scott Summit. Scott designed products like an early prototype of the Palm V (yes, there was a life before the iPhone!) and servers for Apple and Silicon Graphics, but in the last five or so years he’s got very interested in the human body—particularly artificial limbs.
Artificial limbs are an interesting challenge for an industrial designer both because mass production doesn’t do a good job at addressing it and because most of them are interested in form as well as function. Scott started doing his first prototypes on real people three years ago when it became possible to use 3D printing relatively affordably to create bespoke parts customized for individual human needs.
