RESHAPE18 | sensing materialities
wearable technology category
The cyborg hand

The technological development of the last decades has altered the laws of evolution legitimizing future species. The machine is getting more and more humanized and more integrated into human life. This fact causes the rethink and the speculation about the precedence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The
evolution has become an artificial fact, it’s important to redefine which is the relation human-machine and natural-artificial to create new paradigms within the human evolution.
The body is an open project to experiment with. Through electronic prosthesis annexed to the organism, the human becomes and hybrid beside the machine, a cyborg, which objective is to transcend the border of the body over the technology to extend it’s perception and capacities.

The electronic prosthesis, wearables, turns into artificial organs brought into the body, generating new stimulus processed and understood by the brain. The cyborg is the speculation of a new species, a superhuman, who cohabitate in a globalized world performing economical, political, social and cultural
connexions. This transmodern world is exposed in a constant transformation where the digital hegemony generates an unexpected effect of communication technologies. The human being must emancipate using the technology as rehabilitative tool and thus avoid its morbidity.
What if humans are able to extend their perception and are able to generate objective readings of their environment through the implementation of the technology in the body? The hand has always been a symbol of evolution, since our ancestors till the present. What if we evolve it? The cyborg hand proposes a wearable design, which give us the opportunity to feel what we can’t perceive of our surroundings, an open source prosthesis, that each person has the freedom of self-design.
The project proposes a wearable with an electronic circuit formed by an input (sensor) and an output (vibrating motor), which are giving information of air quality data in real time. The user can feel with the motor beats if the air quality is getting worse or improving, according where she or he is by creating a new artificial human sense interpreted by the brain. The principal concept of the cyborg is to be able to understand the phenomena and extend the biology of the human being thanks to technology.

For the design of the wearable, it’s proposed a circuit attached to a customized prosthetic “glove” by  the geometry of the hand of each user getting a total adaptation to the body. The hand of the user is digitized through a 3d scanner and the computer can work with the accurate geometry using a
parameterized tool thus achieving a unique and exclusive design. The production of the prototype is realized by the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) printing, which enables to create the geometry in one piece and one single material, which is the TPU 92A-1, a strong highly flexible thermoplastic
polyurethane derived from Shore A92. The price of the glove is aproximately 60€ and the chip it’s about 20€.
This wearable is a new reality, a futuristic scenario, which requires new disciplines in the field of design and engineering, creating the figure of organ and sense designer for the future cyborgs, promoting the industry 4.0. Some referents of this future trend are Neil Harbisson, Moon Ribas and
Manel Muñoz, cyborg artists co-founders of Transpecies Society (Bcn) and Cyborg Foundation (NY). The technology is part of the history of the human being and its border with the body is increasingly smaller.