A pill dispenser for those with Parkinson's, which copes with shaky hands? Cosmolocals made and designed a solution (via TikTok)
Athlete Jimmy Choi shows off his new pill bottle, designed and 3D printed by TikTok users to be more accessible for people with Parkinson's disease. (Submitted by Jimmy Choi )
We promote the idea of cosmolocalism a lot in A/UK - the notion that localities and communities well below the level of the city or large town can draw down knowledge, design and practice from a digital and global commons. An antidote to the idea of local = parochial.. We are further interested in this as a possible structure for a new kind of local-global politics (watch this space for more details).
But the roots of the concept are in a form of distributed manufacturing - or “design global, make local [DGML]” - as articulated by the P2P Foundation, and aimed at empowerment of localities through production and making. In the early and disorganised days of Covid, DGML was deployed to address local medical equipment shortages.
But this week we heard of a rather beautiful example of the process. The story of it is from this Facebook post (screengrab here) which we’ll reproduce below, and illustrate in inserts. [We assume you all know about the TikTok social media service - usually a theatre for cavorting teenagers, but here put to an entirely different use, as a combination of organisation, community building and display of technique].
The post begins:
For anyone who isn't on Tiktok, I wanted to share a story.
1 week ago, a Tiktok user with Parkinsons [athlete Jimmy Choi, more here] posted a video [embedded below] expressing anger over how tiny the pills for treating Parkinsons are because it makes them really difficult to pick up when someone has something like, you know, Parkinson's.
4 days ago a guy [Brian Alldridge] who directs country music videos for a living [see his IMDB profile], and was previously most famous on Tiktok for knowing obscure facts about Snappple, taught himself how to use Fusion 360 (a design and modelling tool) so he could design a pill bottle that solves the problem.
Problem was though that he didn't own a 3D printer so he posted a video of his design and offered to share schematics with anyone who wanted to test it and or improve upon it [see TikTok video embed below]. All schematics are open source.
3 days ago, dozens of engineers and 3D printer enthusiasts had begun working on the project and started refining and tweaking to get tolerances where they needed to be and ensuring that it actually met the needs of those it was being designed for.
13 hours ago [the post was dated Jan 5th], there is a working prototype, it has "less plastic than your average McDonald's toy, and should be priced as such". The original designer has gotten a patent attorney to ensure it remains open source and the patent itself will be donated to the Michael J. Fox Foundation [for more on these details, see the story on Freethink].
In the meantime, for anytime who needs one now and doesn't want to wait until the manufacturing in scale begins, they can get one at cost from the engineers printing them at home [see this offer in the Thingverse comments space, but there are quite a few also making offers there]
More on the story here from CBC and Nerdbot. From the latter, an interesting quote about TikTok from the object’s designer, Brian Alldridge:
The way that the app prioritizes content that people engage with on a per-view basis allows for all ideas to be considered by the user’s peers on the app, rather than a situation where highly subscribed creators dominate the main space regardless of interest….Because of this, the app was able to figure out what type of people were engaging with the content, which was 3D printers in our case, and rapidly connected a community of amazing people willing to help.
This is a great story of digital amateurism, emotionally-literate social media and craft-oriented networks. Our question from the cosmolocalist perspective is: how can we amplify such fluid and effective, bottom-up (yet global) systems of self-care and self-provision? Is this the kind of thing a CAN (citizen action/community agency network) is meant to do?