How can the everyday life of wheelchair users be facilitated and enriched? A team of wheelchair users, technicians and designers has worked together on need analysis, idea development, prototyping and testing for solutions for wheelchair add ons. Not only the usability, but also the aesthetic side was taken into account: "We want the wheelchair not to look like old school medical equipment and but to look cool and contemporary" says Raul Krauthausen a project participant. The lighting set open°lights is one of our designs that we developed and improved with several testing rounds. There are two common shapes that we call the I and the O. The I is used for  front lights and the floor light. The O is used for a backlighting. The interface of the lights is easy to handle. For building it you need a 3D printer, a laser cutter and a solder. The components of the lights cost less than 20€. The instructions and files needed can be found on thingiverse https://www.thingiverse.com/groups/made-for-my-wheelchair/things.

With the help of open source instructions and maker technologies in Fab Labs our products can be build and customized by the users.
The "Made for my Wheelchair" project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Project partners are Makea Industries GmbH, beable e. V. the Otto Bock Mobility Solutions GmbH and the Sozialhelden e.V ..

The project was led and supported by a great team. Some of them tell the story of the open°lights in this video.

Developing team:

Project lead: Isabelle Dechamps und Nicolai Hertle

Project coordination: Weiwei Wang

Wheelchair users: Raul Krauthausen, Hannah-Luisa Schmidt, Jonas Morgenroth, Kim do Calvario Moquenco, Marc vom Ende, Bernd Brosowsky, Viktor Eizelle

Technical support: Daniel Wessolek, Ahmad A. Taleb, Park Geun Woo, Yair Kira, Marie Vogel

Special thanks to: Holger Dieterich, Kristin Huebner, Jenny Bießmann, Dennis Knoll for contributing and testing!