Design Meets Disability

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The opposite, functional approach prioritizes how well a prosthesis works over how it looks, and has resulted in split hooks. These may work well as tools, but any hand is more than a tool—it becomes part of the wearer’s body image. Yet the design of split hooks barely acknowledges the wearer’s body or clothing.

Sculptor Jacques Monestier has created a prosthetic hand that represents a provocative alternative to both hands and hooks; it is a design that simultaneously acknowledges its role and also its artificiality. The back of his golden hand is cast in the likeness of a human hand, but from an alloy; the palm is upholstered in soft, luxuriant leather. As Monestier explains, “I wanted to transmute what might be considered disfigurement into something marvelous and exotic. I wanted to create a hand that would no longer cause shame and repulsion. I wanted the amputees themselves to be proud to have a prosthetic hand and pleased to look at it. And for the people around them, I wanted the prosthetic hand to be an object of healthy curiosity, a work of art.”

Monestier was inspired in part by a 16th-century painting of a surgeon fixing an artificial hand to an injured soldier: “It was an armored gauntlet, like a golden hand. A beautiful, vibrant, quasi-mythical object—nothing like those dead, pink, plastic hands that pretend to imitate human flesh.”

Excerpted from Design Meets Disability by Graham Pullin, published by the MIT Press. © 2009, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.

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