WHY HAUTE LIMBS
Fast manufacturing processes may never be able to meet the rugged functional needs traditional prosthetics currently do, it can fulfill a much larger set of functional and cosmetic needs than the orthopaedic community has embraced. This is where Haute Limbs desires to step in.
Not by replacing current offerings but by complimenting them to build a more robust and easily accessible set of product and service offerings. Self-serve prosthetic devices and creations, if you will, with design and manufacturing ideas that are customized for upper limb amputees of the 21st century.
THE GOAL
To build a web platform...
How?
...that harnesses the power of easily accessible creative and manufacturing processes, materials and design community for a medical and social need.
...teaches the amputee community how to acquire quality, fashionable prosthetics, cosmesis and adaptive devices for a fraction of the costs the market demands of them.
...normalizes different bodies as beautiful, fashionable and cool.
We live in an age where the technology exists, an exciting array of affordable materials are widely available, and social media has made it easy to build and motivate community. Each of these components are like the wheel hubs of tinker toys. Haute Limbs serve as the rods of connective inspiration that bring everything together to meet a useful human need.
By offering free design files, step by step manufacturing tutorials, pre-made communication tools to ask for professional assistance and even local partner contacts to make their own customized upper limb prosthetics and adaptive devices. Think of Haute Limbs as a self-serve fashionable amputee library in all that such a designation offers.
Partnering with global engineers, technologists, fashion houses, artists and creatives to contribute designs and participate in, partner with or judge annual design competitions and encouraging the use of “other” beautiful body types in the form of amputees in their own creative and functional endeavors.