In 1941, the US Navy commissioned the husband-and-wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames to design a lightweight splint for wounded soldiers to get them out of the field more safely. Metal splints of that period weren’t secure enough to hold the leg still, causing unnecessary death from gangrene or shock, blood loss, and so on. The Eameses had been working on techniques to mold and bend plywood, and they were able to come up with this splint design — conforming to the body without a lot of extra joints and parts. The wood design became a secure, lightweight, nest-able solution, and they produced more than 150,000 such splints for the Navy. Over the next decade, the Eameses would go on to refine their wood-molding process to create both sculpture and functional design pieces, most notably, the celebrated Lounge chair. Graham Pullin, in his book, Design Meets Disability, cites this story as an example of a seemingly specialized design problem — improving a battlefield medical aid for wounded soldiers — that inspired a whole aesthetic in modernist furnishings. The chairs launched a thousand imitators, and a new ethos of simple, organic lines in household objects.
The Eameses’ unpainted wood splint, curved at its edges to keep the leg from falling off, with a targeted set of slots and holes for tying secure restraints. Bottom image courtesy of Hive. Read all: https://medium.com/backchannel/all-technology-is-assistive-ac9f7183c8cd
