MyFoxAL.com – FOX6 WBRC Birmingham, AL
“Evan Kuester became a revolutionary as a hobby.
Kuester was finishing up his architecture degree at SCAD last year when he built his first artificial limb for a design contest using 3D printing, a process in which powder or glue or resin is layered thousands of times to create an object.
“3D printing has been around since the 80s,” said Kuester, “But no one knew how to use it because their computers weren’t strong enough to process three-dimensional models and do cool things like that.”
Kuester posted video of that arm to reddit.com, where it was viewed more than three million times and seen by a group of students at the University of Central Florida.
“They had built a prosthetic arm that didn’t look very good,” he said. “But it functioned very well. They were looking for someone to make their arm look better.”
Kuester completed that arm, and you might have seen it in the online video of Robert Downey, Jr. in character as Tony Stark of Iron Man presenting it to a 7-year old named Alex.
“I designed the whole arm and got it working,” said Kuester. “I got the finger joints working, the wrist and made sure it and that it would fit on the kid.”
Kuester had his second internet sensation when the iron man arm video went viral. And he had a new career path when he saw how the arm changed the life of the little boy he made it for.
“Alex, the kid who got the iron man arm, wears it to school every day,” says Kuester. “And it changed his interaction with students from you’re missing an arm and that’s kind of unnerving to, you have the coolest arm in class.”
Kuester left grad school, and architecture, and now works for 3D Systems in San Francisco making medical devices with 3D printing, and making other lives better the way Alex’s is.
“Everything else I’ve made are cool objects, but they don’t touch anyone’s heart,” he said. “There’s not actually a real impact that you have on people. But with prosthetics, if they’ve lost a limb, I’m replacing something that they’ve lost and so it makes them feel whole again.’
It makes Kuester feel like part of the future already.
“There’s some limitations of the human body,” he said. “But if I am building the human body, the sky’s the limit. You can go nuts. It’s whatever you want to imagine.””
Source: MyFoxAl
