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A Good Life, 2: Indy
GAA's consulting student, Miri Mizrahi, displayed her product design, Indy, a handless walker for disabled and/or older persons at the Annual Show at Parson School of Design. The shiny dark aqua blue walker with perky orange wheels sits prominently in the Gallery's large window opening onto Fifth Avenue at 13th Street in New York. The Gallery Show, featuring product designs that address issues of not for profit organizations in New York, opened on April 13 and will run until April 22, 2005.
Last September Miri, a second year Parsons graduate student found Global Action on Aging and decided that she wanted to design a product that would increase accessibility for disabled and/or older persons. She had listened to older persons who used walkers. They told her that they wanted to use their hands for more than guiding the walker. Freeing their hands, they argued, would give them more access to take part in life around them. But how to do it? Here at Global Action, we located UN resources and experts who might help make her idea real and we waited to see what would happen.
Six months later, the gleaming "Indy" sat parked in the Gallery window on Wednesday. Within an hour an older woman had burst into the gallery to ask where she could buy one!
While GAA thought Miri's project was the "best," of the show, every visitor will be stunned at the imaginative ways that design students approached making life better for persons dealing with mobility handicaps. One could not help reflect on the tremendous capacity for good that talented people produce-meeting actual human needs-
if given the chance to experiment with new approaches.
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