99% Invisible - Adapt or Design

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

A debilitating injury forces 99PI's Kurt Kohlstedt to confront new everyday challenges and seek out accessible design solutions for one-handed living.The full set of Adapt or Design articles can be found at 99pi.org/adapt.Adapt or Design Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. 99PI's Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director, the co-author of the 99% Invisible city, and just generally someone who thinks and writes a lot about design. So naturally, assistive design, which is tailored for people with disabilities, has been on his radar. But Kurt's personal relationship with it changed pretty drastically about a year ago, when something happened to transform the way he moves through the world.

Kurt recently wrote a series of articles on our website called Adapt or Design about his journey into the world of assistive technology. He's here to talk about the inspiration for that series and about designing his own assistive tech, some of which he now uses every day. Hey Kurt, thanks for talking to us about this. Hey Roman, yeah, good to be here. So this all started about a year ago when you sustained a pretty serious injury.

Can you tell folks what happened? Yeah, well, I went to bed one night with my partner and the next thing I knew, I was wandering around my condo in sort of a daze and I'm not sure how I got home from her place. Like I don't remember like an entirely normal day that I spent with her before that. I just kind of like ended up in this walking dream state and I was a bit

concerned because my, my right arm was paralyzed and I couldn't feel anything in that arm. And so I called my girlfriend at work and she was like, you know, are you okay? And I said, I'm not really sure. And I think that's like a universal signal of like, okay, you're not okay. Because if you don't know how to answer that question, that's a bad sign. And so she immediately came over to my place from work and was like, we should go to the emergency room as soon as she saw me. And I was like, well, I don't know, maybe we should get a second opinion.

How about we call my dad first? Who is not a medical doctor. No, he's got a PhD, So he's a he's a doctor You know a doctor of geophysics. So he's like a rock doctor So yeah, I wasn't exactly thinking straight Yeah, you know that was very clear and so my girlfriend talked over me as I like tried to explain things and she's just like come Here now we need to go to the hospital Yeah, and so he did he came picked us up and and drove us to the hospital. Yeah. And so he did. He came, picked us up, and drove us to the hospital. So you went to the hospital.

You're talking to some doctors. And they're helping you fill in some blanks of this injury. So could you describe what they think happened? Yeah. So there was a lot of mystery. There were a lot of tests. And I ended up staying in the hospital for a full week as they sort of unraveled this puzzle as best they could.

And what they concluded was that I'd had some sort of neurocardiac event and had wound up unconscious on the floor, lying on top of my arm, which cut off blood flow and ultimately did a ton of damage to my brachial plexus, which is this nerve nexus between your spinal column and your arm. And the nerves all the way down my arm to my fingertips were severely damaged. Yeah.

And at this point, was there a notion as to how temporary or permanent, you know, your arm paralyzation was going to be? Yeah, it was sort of a slow, slow, slow unfolding because yeah, I did. I went from thinking, oh, you know, my arm's just like asleep, just like really, really deeply asleep maybe. But you know, nothing's broken and I'm at the hospital, things are gonna be fine.

So like slowly understanding as they explained things that like, this is not an injury you recover from in days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. Like it is an injury that you may incrementally recover from up to a point, but it's permanent. And so I had to go from thinking of it in terms of being an injury to thinking of it

in terms of being a disability. Yeah, yeah. The reason why I wanna talk to you about this and have this be an episode of the show is that you have a mind that has written and thought about design for a very long time, like all your professional career, you've done it for us for almost 10 years at this point.

And this is a world that is designed for two functional arms. And now you put in this situation where all of a sudden the two handedness or the right handed dominant two handedness of the world becomes very, very clear. And so what I'm hoping is you can kind of walk us through the world you encountered when you left the hospital. Yeah, and what I'll say is while I was in the hospital in my kind of bubble, I mean,

I was worried about, you know, things like writing about design, you know? This kind of big picture stuff, but you're right. I mean, as soon as you leave that kind of safe, enclosed, contained space, reality hits like a brick. And the first thing you notice is in swapping out your hospital robe for your pants and your shirt, suddenly I'm sitting there with my non-dominant left arm trying to put these things on and figure out like, okay, well now I've got my phone in my right pocket, I can't even reach that

anymore. It immediately becomes clear that there's a lot of adaptation that's going to need to take place. So what are some of the solutions that you found? Like how did you deal with, you know, your phone being in your right hand pocket and you can't quite reach it? So I don't have my right pocket sort of accessible anymore, which means I've got half the pocket capacity. And so what I did was I started pulling things out of that pocket and they cooking those things up in different places so for example, I took everything out of my wallet and I put it in one of those kind of Retractable key card reader things that you use for access to you know, the bus or the train or your work

So that was good It got the wallet out of the way and I took my phone and I put it in this holster Which I could then clip, then clip on the side of my pants. Everything that I could, I moved somewhere else, keeping it sort of readily accessible, but out of the way at the same time. And one of the very few advantages of wearing a bunch of different slings early on was that I had a lot of places to clip things.

One thing that comes to mind as something that is especially difficult to do with one hand is putting on shoes, especially shoes with laces that need to be tied. And it also seems like a weird mental state to be in because the last time you couldn't tie your shoes, you were probably a small child, you know? And so could you talk about how you've managed

that particular challenge? Yeah, well at least for me all of my shoes are laced. So I went out and I looked for Something that would be a sort of prefab, you know off-the-shelf all in one solution and I found these lace locking kits and They have these widgets inside that you thread your laces through and then you sort of cinch the widget up and down. It's kind of like like cinching up a bolo tie. But then like you've got a problem because your laces are

no longer being looped and tied. And so they need to be shortened. But once you clip your laces shorter, the ends immediately start to unravel. And so the other part of these kits are these tips that clip onto the end. And they're kind of like big and plastic and ugly and uncannily. And so I went out looking for some kind of more DIY, subtle solution that wouldn't be quite so loud. And so what I ended up doing is I bought heat shrink thermoplastic tubing, which basically like you slot

the clipped end of your lace into this. And then, ideally I think you take like a heating element or something more official, but I just ran a lighter underneath it to sort of cinch it up. That's a heating element, yeah. Yeah, it's a heating element. And although I will say, one thing I learned from that is, you know, don't try this at home, especially

when you're one handed. Like I'm sitting there, you know, like toying around with a lighter, which is hot and burning my fingers. And it was like an early realization that like I have one working hand. I cannot afford to jack this thing up, right? Like it's, this is now more vital than ever.

But the result is you have these aglets that look like they come sort of straight out of the factory, right? And so that's the thing that, you know, signals to people, hey, I've got normal shoelaces on. Okay. So you've got lock laces, which are a great way to adapt the shoes that you already have

so that they're easier to put on one-handed. But you also looked into some accessible off-the-shelf options. And what you discovered there was that there were some really innovative, creative shoe designs out there. Yeah, so, lock laces are fast and cheap, and they're a great way to, you know, make use of your existing footwear. But I did end up getting a pair of specially designed, hands-free shoes that basically, like, you pop out of them and they break open in the middle.

Like, they kind of, they like wedge themselves open and you slide your foot out into the air. And then when you're ready to put them on, you slide your foot in, press your heel down and it just locks back into place. And what I love about them is partly, you know, how well they work and that they sort of hug your heel, but also there's this kind of rubber band

that runs along the side and that's what locks it into place in both configurations, both open and closed. And so being able to see that structural element really sort of tickles my design fancy. I love the kind of honesty and clarity of that design. And I think that was part of what drew me to that particular pair. It's like the Central Pompidou of know, like all the mechanics are on the outside

to show you how the thing works. It's exactly that. It's very expressive in that way. And yet it also looks like a normal pair of shoes. So to the uninitiated, it doesn't look like you're wearing something janky, but if you know what you're looking at, you can see how it works. And that's what I love. So you found a new design in shoe that you really love. Talk to me about some of the things

that you've grown to hate as a person navigating the world with one arm. Yeah, so one of the things that became the bane of my existence are conventional plastic side sort of clippy buckles, the kinds that you find on backpacks and you know, everything else in your life that carries things. And so one of the problems that I discovered was that buckles are really hard to work with

and hard to like unclick and hard to snap back into place. And you know, those are everywhere. They're on your backpack, they're on all these different things. But what I found was when I was looking for this strap to keep one of my orthoses in place, which is the sling that kind of kept my limp arm from dangling and just sort of hanging there, I needed something that would basically serve like a sternum strap on a backpack. And what I found was one that has a magnetic buckle. And once I realized the incredible, amazingness of magnetic buckles, I just started putting them on everything. Like I took a bunch of my stuff to the tailor and like had them replace a bunch of things. I did some of my own and yeah. And so now everything that can have a

magnetic buckle has a magnetic buckle And what makes a magnetic buckle so amazing is that the force of the magnet pulls it together and you can snap into place You can kind of do it all with one hand. You just have to get them close together Yeah, that's right. Part of it is like the beauty of being able to unclip it one-handed but really like the master stroke is that It just snaps back into place and the hold is strong. Like once you hear that click, it's like that thing isn't going anywhere. That's a really strong connection because it's like both a magnetic and a mechanical connection. Like

the magnet brings it into place and then once it snaps, it's like you need to mechanically unfasten it to get it free. That's awesome. I mean, it's safe to say that most of the world is harder to navigate, obviously, with one arm versus two. But also, through your injury, you've discovered that some of the world is accidentally, you know,

kind of works for a left-handed person or one working left arm person. Yeah, I've become sort of fond of saying that the world is designed for two handed people first, right handed people second, and left handed people last. And in most cases, that's the case. But weirdly, like when I was kind of gearing back up to like trying to drive again,

which was, you know, scary, a scary thought. And like I was gonna, you know, go off into a side road, you know, like roll around a parking lot, try to figure it out. And as soon as I got behind the wheel and sort of got myself into position and started, I realized like, oh, this is actually surprisingly easy because I grew up using a stick shift.

But these days, your right hand doesn't have a lot to do. It's like the kind of tertiary functions of like windshield wipers and things, Sure, but that's about it. The left hand is what controls things like the blinkers and like, you know, the headlights and all of that stuff. So driving around left handed is actually not that bad. Yeah, which which I was not really expecting. But it's one of those things you only discover through trying, right? Yeah,

yeah. It's so surprising to me, but it's one of those things you only discover through trying, right? Yeah, it's so surprising to me because it's totally true, but we created so much of the design of the car based on the fact that changing gears is difficult and is better used for your right hand, mostly. And you're doing it constantly. That's where the control comes from, right? That gear shifting up and down, it's this regular thing. And then when it's gone, it leaves this control comes from, right? It's like that gear shifting up and down, it's this regular thing. And then when it's gone,

it leaves this void of opportunity, right? Yeah, so it's so funny to me that cars might be one of those things that is just sort of accidentally designed for left-handed people, at least in the US and all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, lots of caveats. But yes, like it is absolutely the case that like when I am driving, it's like one of the few, if not the only time when I'm like, oh's one of the few, if not the only time,

when I'm like, okay, thank goodness that it is my right hand that doesn't work and not my left. That is not normally the case. After the break, Kurt talks about the surprisingly difficult task of finding the perfect one-handed keyboard. I'm back with 99PI's Kurt Kohlstedt.

Kurt, we've talked about some of the ways you've designed around various challenges following your injury, but we haven't yet talked about one of your most personal obstacles, which is the ability to write. So you are a design journalist. It is your job to write. I know that is your great joy to write, but typing one-handed is incredibly arduous, probably more so than most people realize. Yeah, the thing that I realized very quickly, and I kind of knew even before I tried it was that the process of writing isn't just, you know, typing out keys and like, you know, hitting letters that make words and things.

It's like constantly re-editing yourself and like doing all of this on the fly and at speed and jumping between the mouse and the keyboard. So, yeah, it's safe to say that that was like in many ways my biggest concern. Big picture. So I want to talk about speech to text because speech to text has gotten quite advanced in the last few years and I've seen you use it on Slack. But you've said that this is not something that works for you as a writer in a more general sense.

Can you talk about that? Well, the reality is I do use it like it's part of my sort of kit of tools for writing and other things. Like it's great for texting. It's great for emails. But if you didn't know this already about me, I'm a bit of a rambler. So when it comes to writing and like my particular process, like I spend a lot of time going over things and refining and editing on the fly. And so for for me personally, it leads me down this dangerous path of just being verbose, which I am verbose enough in my everyday life. But one of the things I've learned is that different things work for different people,

and it all kind of works together in the end. Yeah. So companies do make keyboards specifically designed for one hand. I know that you got kind of obsessed with trying these out. Can you describe some of your process of learning about one handed keyboards? Yeah. Yeah. Well, even before I kind of got to those, I really, you know, I looked for ways to do it on a normal keyboard, right? Like right one handed. And what I discovered is there are touch typing systems for doing that, but you move your hand so much, it really subjects you to extra stress.

And so like it really quickly became apparent that if I was going to stay a writer, I needed like a one handed hardware solution that was really designed for this to minimize hand movement. So I did a bunch of research as one does. Well, as you do. I don't know as one does, necessarily. But go ahead, continue.

Yeah, yeah, I dove very, very, very deep into this. And I kind of looked at everything in existence. So what are some of the highlights of the things that you found? Well, I basically narrowed it down to like three choices. And they all were surprisingly different like it's not like a two-handed keyboard where like everything is kind of the same just like with tweaks and mods like we're talking totally different layouts and interfaces

and so before I could really decide like I'm gonna get one of these especially because they're really expensive yeah I was like I have to try them and they also you know they're not sitting out at Best Buy, you have to get them somehow. So the first step for me was finding this this great adaptive tech library here in Minnesota, which loans these things out for free, like a normal library, except a normal library that lends out things that are worth like 1000 thousands of dollars. So yeah, they sent me these keyboards that I requested and I started using them and seeing how they worked.

That's an incredible service. I mean, every few days I am like wowed by the importance and the sort of great innovation of libraries. And that's just that's just stunning. Okay, so they sent you a few keyboards to try, some very expensive keyboards that you'd have to special order. What did you find?

Well, so I started with this one that's sort of like the Buick of one-handed keyboards. It's like this vintage, giant 1970s clunker and it's called the Meltron. And it's made by this company that sort of really made a splash in ergonomic design early on, like when that wasn't really a thing, by curving their keyboards.

And they started with a two-handed design and quickly moved to this really kind of sculptural, very provocative looking one-handed design. You showed me the Maltron. The Maltron is curved in this way that it has this concave bowl of key. So you sort of set your hand inside of the bowl. And from that vantage point,

you can sort of reach more keys with your hand in one position. Exactly, exactly. Because like on a flat surface, right, you have to sort of move your hand about, but it's like, if you were just hovering your hand and you can flick your fingers in three dimensions, like having that bowl shape is really awesome

and it makes things a lot more accessible. But I think what really kind of killed it for me was that only about half the keys are even in that bowl. Like the alphabet is there and some of like the basic, you know, modifier keys like shift and control are there. But there are a bunch of keys, about half, that are on these flat surfaces outside the bowl. So while your hand is in there,

it can reach all the keys very easily, but once you lift it out, you have to move it around a lot. And I'm not sure, in the end, if I ended up moving my hand less or more while using this. Then a conventional keyboard. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so the Maltron didn't work for you. Another one that you have mentioned to me is called the tippy

That's shaped like a slice of pie. What lessons about one-hand typing did you learn about the tippy? Yeah, well like that shape is is really nice It's like if you splay out your fingers and like trace like a shape around that sort of flat palm of yours That's kind of the shape of this board. And that means you can essentially reach everything without anything but like a little bit of wrist movement, which is great, like minimal movement, awesome. And like one of the clever tricks that they employed was sort of pushing certain keys off to the periphery that were less important and making the core keys

that are like right under your hand serve more functions. So like letters, instead of just being like a letter key that generates either a small or a cap version of a letter, it might also generate a number. And so if you press down a key, you can access this additional layer of functions in that most accessible part of the board. Yeah, so you're moving your hand less,

but keys take on more functions by using like alt keys and shift keys and stuff people are familiar with. Yeah. This also required a steep learning curve and so you decided this was not for you. Yeah, honestly, learning a whole new keyboard layout and a whole new set of specialized keys using only my non-dominant hand,

it really got to be a bit overwhelming, to be honest. I can imagine that. And of course, that doesn't mean that this is a bad design. I suspect Tippy could work great for somebody who is young and starting from scratch. Somebody who's not burdened by both having to unlearn one system and then learn another system at the same time.

Yeah, which leads us to one of the designs for one-handed keyboards that you liked the best, which is the half-quarty. Could you describe what a half-quarty keyboard is? Well, as the name suggests, it is kind of like half of a quarty keyboard, almost as if you just cut one in half and kept the left side only. Right, so I'm looking at a picture of it now,

and it's really small, like maybe half or even a third the size of a standard QWERTY keyboard. And like you said, the main keys on this thing are the ones that you'd find on the left side of a standard keyboard, minus the numbers and some of the modifier keys. Right, right, exactly. And so the design is made to tap into our muscle memory,

our ability to sort of brain-body connect with different parts of the keyboard as we touch type. And it's a little hard to picture at first, but just imagine drawing a line down the center of a normal two-handed keyboard, and then folding that keyboard in half from right to left along that line. It's like closing a book.

And so now every letter on the right matches up with a letter on the left and is layered on top of that letter. And then to access that next layer, you have to press a modifier key. So for example, the Q key is in the far upper left and the P key is in the far upper right. But when you hold down this modifier key,

in this case the space bar, it changes the Q into a P. It's like when you hold down the shift key to get a capital letter. Right. And from there you can kind of generalize the rest of them. They're all mirrored in that same way And if this sounds like a little hard to follow and you're having trouble picturing it That's actually not really a problem because you're not meant to picture it and you're not meant to remember where these things are in spatial

Relationship to one another you're meant to remember them with your fingers And it's that mind-body connection that frankly shocked me with its efficacy. Like I could not believe how quickly my left hand learned to type things on the right side because I was using the same fingers and the same kinds of motions as I was used to using just as, you know, in a mirror image form.

Got it. Okay. So if you, you hit the Q with your pinky, the other pinky is for the P, which is all the way across the board. And you're basically keeping that consistent in favor of keeping it kind of like in the same relative position on the board. That is fascinating to me. Yeah, it is really fascinating and a bit magical and really awesome when it comes to the letter keys. But the problem is, because you have this tiny board, you have to cram all of these other functions in from other places too. Like the mirror only gets you at most, you know, two punctuation marks, generally just one letter, you know, from the right side. But these keys have as many as six different

symbols. So for example, the Q key gets you to the P key really easily. But you also need it to get you to the right parentheses, the exclamation point, the hyphen, and it also serves on top of all of that as your delete key. So those parts became much harder to learn and the reality is you have to remember all of these different combinations and there's no safety net, there's no backup plan.

Like at least on a full keyboard, you can just hunt and peck around if you forget how to do some convoluted thing. But on this, you can't. You're just stuck and have to look it up. So you got all these keyboards from the library, and I'm sending a donation right away as soon as this is over. You should. And I'm sending a donation right away as soon as this is over But in the end, what did you choose for?

Writing and facilitate your career as a writer Oh, so I went into this thinking like okay, I want an off-the-shelf solution, right? I want something that's one and done I'm gonna pick one of these three. It's just a matter of like which one. And suddenly I'm like, man, they really all have these advantages that I really like, but they also have these really serious downsides. Like the Maltron, you still have to move your hand around on a lot, and the Tippy has this completely new layout you need to learn, and the Half-Qwerty, it's probably my favorite of the bunch,

but you have to remember a ton of modifier key combinations to be able to use it, even at a basic level, because it has so few keys. So in the end, none of these was like my Goldilocks keyboard. But while I was researching the Half-QWERTY, what I learned is that some people have programmed their own two-handed keyboards to work the same way. So like you create a modifier on your keyboard and you press it down and it creates a mirror

board. And what that means is that you can preserve all the functions on your normal keyboard that's right in front of you, but you can also access this other layer of everything that's on the right without having to move your hand to the right. And that was the key realization that just sort of opened the dam, because once I did that, right,

once I learned that I could fairly easily program my keyboard to work like a mirror board and like a normal keyboard at the same time, I was like, well, what else can I get it to do? And so I created different layers with these different modifiers. You know, there's like a punctuation layer that's accessed with one button and like there's a layer for the numbers all kind of mirror as well as the letters. So you can still fall back on your normal layout if you're just hunting and pecking. But you also have this completely new way to learn how to use a keyboard one-handed. So basically you programmed all these layers of functions into the keyboard that you already

have so you can use it as the mirrored one-handed keyboard if you want to, but you can also use it as a conventional keyboard if you forget or just don't feel like using the various key combinations because everything is still there on the right hand side. And that sounds like a brilliant solution. Yeah, I mean, I think of it as the best of all worlds, right? It's built into whatever device you have, right? And yeah, I retain all these functions that I had before and it is software-based,

which means you can copy and share it fairly easily. Like you could set this up at home in a couple of minutes. So I also have put it up on our website and like anybody who wants to download and use this thing, which I'm kind of tongue in cheek calling the Kirti, you know like Kirti. Like the files are there. I have like the sort of setup instructions,

like a guide for labeling your keys with these different kind of layers of functionality, all that's on the website and it's free. And in addition to that, this is a whole series that you created called Adapt or Design. That's a web series of many articles on the website. Can you describe a little bit more

about what people will find there? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like a play on sort of a adapt or die. And, but the idea is like, you know, I had to adapt or design my way out of all these problems And so I wanted to share those challenges and solutions with people. So it's a series of articles that are about Things like, you know how to adapt to one-handedness including like, you know challenges I faced and solutions I found that I'd really like to help other people leapfrog if they encounter similar situations.

And then also things about long haul recoveries after a severe nerve injury and all that that entails and how to organize your rehabilitation and how design can play a role in that too. Wow. And so lastly, how are you feeling right now? Where are we one year later? Yeah, well, I'm a lot better in a lot of ways.

I've regained some functionality in my arm and my hand. I'd like to say that I'm at like the kind of claw game phase of my recovery where like I can kind of like hover my hand over things and like drop it down like one of those arcade chains where you gotta try to grab that prize and then like lift it back out. And sometimes it works, but often it doesn't. And so- It really often doesn't.

My kid spent an inordinate amount of money in Japan on those machines, okay. Yeah, so I used that as kind of like the inspiration for the logo for this series. And then, but yeah, like overall, you know, I feel a lot better. Like the pain, which was at one point excruciating and borderline intolerable is much reduced.

And yeah, I'm starting to be able to incorporate my right arm and hand again into functional things, but I am still, you know, when I go for my keys and I open the front door, my left hand is still not smart enough to get the key in the right spot consistently. And it's kind of remarkable to me. Like, you know, I feel like if I was a kid, I probably would have adapted by now.

But you know, as an old, my right hand dominance sort of remains. And so I'm hoping that eventually that hand can once again be the dominant hand rather than the sort of dumb cousin of my left Well, I really appreciate you taking the time Kurt and for sharing all this with everybody. It really is a great service So thank you so much. Yeah Roman. Thanks for having me You can find all of Kurt's adapt or design articles as well as instructions on how to set up your own KERDI keyboard at 99pi.org slash adapt. 99% Invisible was produced this week by our digital director Kurt Kohlstedt and Isabel Angel and edited by Kelly Prime mixed by Martine Gonzalez music by Swan Real.

Cathy too is our executive producer Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashma Don, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on blue sky as well as our own discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99 PI at 99PI.org.