Building with Cardboard
Presenting Building with Cardboard, your introduction to the essentials of cardboard carpentry. I began working on this book in collaboration with ADA immediately following my summer internship in 2016. It has been a few years and many edits in the making and is ready for you to enjoy. Download your copy, familiarize yourself with the essentials of cardboard carpentry, and begin building custom solutions for yourself and for people close to you.
I first heard about ADA while in the car listening to the radio. Alex Truesdell was being interviewed on NPR about how she had gotten the idea for creating Adaptive Design while caring for her aunt. It sounded like a really compelling idea, something that was missing from what I had learned from design school. She put forward a complete focus on the user, planning the design process entirely around their needs. I sent in an application to intern for the summer of 2016. I was lucky enough to get the internship and started working that summer.
I started building right away, there was a constant flow of new projects. I worked first on a set of ergonomic chair additions for a boy named Jared, then on a knife tool for a man who had limited use of his hands, followed by a collapsible and mobile sitting support for a girl named CC. The best part of the process was that each project represented a person who had a lot to gain out of these adaptations, and putting a real face to that work was a positive motivation that we could always draw upon.
The project that best represented this for me was a rocking chair we built for Hannah, a girl who spent most of her day in a wheelchair. She was growing out of the old ADA-made rocking chair, which allowed her to move using her legs and gave her agency over her own body that the wheelchair didn’t. Most importantly it allowed her to take part in playing with her sister and generally gave her a new way to bond with her family. The part of the process I remember well came in the middle when I had gotten really preoccupied with how everything came together, how components might slide to allow for small adjustments to be made, to the point where I lost sight of how it would help Hannah. Things were going really slowly and I had to pause and re-evaluate, and remember that the project wasn’t just an interesting problem to be solved but something Hannah would use daily and that just needed to really work. After that shift in mindset, all the superficial tweaks and cleverness I was trying to incorporate became trivial and the design got better and simpler all at once.
That concept of constantly re-focusing on the user was the lesson that’s stuck with me from my time at ADA. Both because of how important that focus was to make the chair valuable to Hannah and because of how often it comes up as I’ve started to work as an industrial designer. It is very easy to get lost in the details and become so engrossed in solving mechanical problems that you forget why you’re doing the work in the first place, and taking the time to step back and reconsider who the project is for ends up making the experience better for all involved.
About the Author
Paul Reamey received his Masters of Industrial Design at Pratt Institute in 2017. He currently works at TKDG, a design firm in Norwalk, CT specializing in medical devices. During Paul's internship at Adaptive Design in the summer of 2016, he discovered that people everywhere need one-off solutions, and he also learned that with basic tools, techniques, and corrugated cardboard you can make a drastic difference in the lives of others. Immediately following his internship he was inspired to write Building with Cardboard in collaboration with ADA, which is now also available in Spanish. Its purpose is to introduce you to the essentials of cardboard carpentry and to encourage you to build custom solutions for yourself and for people close to you.