AKIS PANOUSOPOUSLOS
Being able to talk to a professional surgeon and inventor is, of course, an incredibly amazing thing. Being able to access a very in-depth, personal, and unique account of why and how something is made doesn't come about very often, especially straight out of the horse's mouth.
I think I would have continued my Expanded Art Forms idea of looking into e-mail apnea had I known about Panousopoulos and his work, designing breathing apparatus and using a 3D printer to realize the product. I might have done. The issue is that I don't have a fraction of the interest that Panousopoulos has. He also has the experience (hands-on research) of using these machines, knowing how much they cost, understanding the mechanisms that work together to create a system for assisted breathing. He could realize an actual product that works and goes out to help real people. Not wanting to sell myself short, I don't think I could have visualized an idea at the stage I was at.
Panousopoulos wasn't just trying to make a quick buck out of the Covid-19 fallout. He explained that he was trying to make a change to the extremely overpriced ventilators that are on the hospital market today.
Part of Akis Panousopoulos's methodology was to make something that worked, not to make something that looked nice. He avoided aesthetics in preference of functionality. This makes sense when designing a ventilator, why would it need to look good? It just needs to ventilate.
The reason this is so interesting is that it approaches the act of making from a completely different perspective to that which we have been subject to through this course. Art just needs to have some emotional appeal - while medicinal machines need to have a physical benefit.
This offers the question, can art have a physical benefit? I'm not going to ask the opposite - do medicinal machines need to appeal to our emotions? - because they do not. They just have to work.
BREATHE
Below is an experiment which uses a physical response to control the size of a sphere. It could be refined in order to be implemented as a visualizer on a respitory machine.
Currently, this program uses the default microphone on your computer to make the sphere change in size. It would be great to be able to use a digital stethoscope or a properly designed contact microphone. The relaxing design is meant to sooth the nerves of those who have a nervous disposition towards doctors, or medical equipment.