Ross Atkin uses design to make life easier for disabled people. From creating streets that give audio directions to blind people, to building custom toys for children with cerebral palsy, he makes technology accessible to those who need it most.
Atkin is a 34-year-old designer, engineer and researcher. He has been obsessed with building things since an early age. “Growing up I would always be making things with my dad and he told me that there was a job where you got paid to make things that helped people,” he says.
He studied mechanical engineering at The University of Nottingham and industrial design at the Royal College of Art. After graduating, he soon realised he wasn’t content with design being an indulgent pursuit. “You had a lot of people with big egos making chairs and not really changing the world.”
So he started looking at how he could make design useful. Atkin, who spoke at WIRED Next Generation 2017, runs a company that designs and builds products to solve problems for disabled people. He's currently working on the Responsive Street Furniture project with Marshalls, a manufacturing company. He began, in his own words, by following blind people around in the name of research. He spent eight years looking at the lives of 70 different in five different cities, trying to understand how they navigate the streets.
“As a designer, you realise there's so much that we could be doing differently to make life easier, if only we understood what people needed and we listened to them,” he says. "We often make a trade off between the needs of different people. Often, different disabled people have different needs in that respect."
This is why he’s designing streets that adapt to your needs. Whether you need more time to cross, bollards which deliver navigation information in any language you need, brighter street lights or chairs which you can pull out of the wall. “The users carry a little bluetooth tag that run for six months on a little watch battery. That tag becomes associated with the help that person would like. Whenever they come close to one of the responsive items it will deliver the service they have asked for,” he says.
Transport For London is currently trialling Atkin’s pedestrian crossing system in London. They are evaluating whether the the extra time requests are being triggered when people are actually crossing - not nearby or passing on a bus. “Traffic engineers spend their whole careers clawing back precious seconds and there are not going to give them away just willy nilly, so we have to convince them that it actually works really reliably,” Atkin says.
Atkin doesn’t just design for the masses. As one of the experts on the BBC's The Big Life Fix, he works with a team of designers, engineers and programmers to build technological solutions to individual problems.
Take eight-year-old twins Ayala and Caira. Ayala has relatively severe cerebral palsy, so she can't control her arms and legs. “I wanted to build something that would allow the girls to play together as equals,” Atkin says. "Ayala's really ninja at driving her wheelchair around, which she does with two head switches. So I thought; what if I create toys that are controllable with these kind of access switches?”
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He asked Ayala to draw a toy. With the pen in her mouth, she created a fire engine that shoots water. Atkin went away and built a 3D-printed toy fire engine that shoots bubbles (he didn’t think their mother would be too happy with water shooting around the house). It's controlled by an app, which is controlled by a switch just like the one on Ayala's wheelchair.
"We played football with the two robots. Ayala won and Caira absolutely lost it - because she'd never lost before," Atkin says, smiling. “Being able to create completely new products that solve problems is such an incredibly privileged position to be in.”
You can watch Ross Atkin’s designs come to life onThe Big Life Fix Children in Need Specialon Wednesday November 8 at 9pm on BBC Two.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
