This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

99PI's Kurt Colstead 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, Ruman. 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

days. 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

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