As I started in with my idea for a happy prosthetic, I knew that I already had a few constraints, the first being that the happy prosthetic needs to somehow tie the other two prosthetics together, uniting them both visually and conceptually. I also know that I don’t want to use the same movements and body parts for this prosthetic as I have the other prosthetics. With this in mind, I started to brainstorm different ideas for the happy prosthetic.

I started by thinking of things that make me happy, and had images from childhood; running on playgrounds playing games, hopscotch, hoola-hoops. I thought of joyful movements, like the happy dance football players do after scoring a touch-down, or the immediacy of our reactive and silly motion we get when our ice cream drips on a hot summer day or we miss catching a ball and go wildly chasing after it. I also thought of light-hearted sounds; thumb pianos, bells, sounds that make me smile.

I began thinking about materials and balancing those materials throughout the prosthetics as a unit. I already have one prosthetic made out of bronze, and I have one prosthetic made out of leather, and it seems like the next reasonable medium to explore could be wood.

I took all these thoughts and slept on them for a few days really thinking and pondering this prosthetic and came up with a prosthetic that looks almost as a chandelier. This design has a center hoop with different arms hanging off of it pointing outwards, which bounce when moved. This way the prosthetic can be played just by the body moving and jumping, but also by the wearer being more deliberate, lifting up certain arms and moving them. This way the prosthetic works both as an attachment which feeds off of body movement as well as an attachment that can be puppeteered by the wearer.