Those who can walk are in the minority at the home of Ralf David Hotchkiss, an engineer who has designed a wheelchair for people in underdeveloped countries, where roads are made of mud, sand or snow.
Four of the six people in the house on a day earlier this year were paraplegics and wheelchair riders, including Hotchkiss, 48, who won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1989 for his wheelchair creation, and his wife, Deborah Kaplan, a lawyer who wages her own struggle on behalf of disabled people. Also there were the Hotchkisses' son, Desmond, 10, with a friend.Last year, Hotchkiss received a $10,000 Chrysler Innovation in Design Award, and in 1994 he won the $50,000 Henry B. Betts Award for work in disability rights and rehabilitation medicine. His house is his workshop, laboratory and base of operations.
In this one-story, wood-frame house high in the Oakland hills, neatness is not a priority; it is a barrier. Putting everything away and out of sight only means seeking and searching. Instead, maximum access and convenience are most often the rule. ("That doesn't have to mean pajamas on the bedroom floor," Kaplan said.) A wire basket full of bags of tortilla chips and crackers hangs from the ceiling, as does a basket of tools.
In 1966, at 18, Hotchkiss was paralyzed from the chest down in a motorcycle accident. Kaplan, 46, calls herself "a walking quadriplegic," meaning she sometimes walks with a cane, sometimes uses a wheel-chair. In 1972, she dived into a creek near Santa Cruz, Calif.; hit a rock and broke her neck. Three years later, while at Boalt Hall Law School at the University of California at Berkeley, she was writing a paper on consumer protection regarding defective wheelchairs.
"A professor thought it was a trivial subject," she said. A friend suggested she get in touch with Hotchkiss, whom she first met over the telephone in 1975 and then at a conference on independent living. In 1977, they were married, and two years later they bought the house, which was built in 1971 and designed to be wheelchair accessible. Later, they adopted Desmond.
Together, Hotchkiss and Kaplan have been trying to make the world accessible to disabled people navigating muddy roads in countries like Brazil or Vietnam or the latest computers in the United States.
As the technical director of the Wheeled Mobility Center at San Francisco State University, he works with people in Third World countries to develop solutions to the problems of their terrain. He also sets up workshops abroad, traveling three to four months a year to places like Nicaragua, Mexico and Cambodia.
Hotchkiss estimates that there are 20 million people in the Third World who need wheelchairs. Since 1980, more than 10,000 copies of the chair he designed, known as the Whirlwind, have been made in 25 countries by a cottage industry of 200 people. The building instructions are all in his 162-page book, "Independence Through Mobility: A Guide to the Manufacture of the ATI-Hotchkiss Wheelchair." (Appropriate Technology International, based in Washington, helped to finance the the Whirlwind's development.)
The wheelchair can be made by people with access to steel tubing, bicycle wheels and a blacksmith. To navigate through mud, sand and snow, the chair incorporates thick mountain-bicycle wheels in the rear and wide soft-molded wheels in the front. The bearings, which let the wheels spin freely, are fashioned from common nails with the heads snipped off, slathered with grease, rather than from balls.
"Ball-bearings are way overpriced and can cost $100 for the 12 ball-bearings needed for one chair," Hotchkiss said, "but nails cost only $1." The chair also has arms that curve downward, enabling riders to transfer themselves laterally from the chair to a bed without being obstructed by the arm. In Third World countries, the chair sells for $100 to $250.
If you take an American lightweight wheelchair and try to go around the world on it, he said, "you would need a steady line of supply parts and an 800 number."
Hotchkiss's chairs weigh 30 to 35 pounds, so they are as light as the best $1,000 aluminum wheelchairs.
While Hotchkiss works for physical access for the disabled, Kaplan battles for electronic access. As a vice president of the World Institute on Disability, a nonprofit public policy group based in Oakland, she works for ways to make com-puters usable by disabled people. She said she would like to see captioning on CD-ROMs and information kiosks, and auto-mated teller machines that that could speak to blind users.
From the street, the 1,800-square-foot house looks like any other house on the block. In the driveway are the family's two hand-controlled vans.
Inside the house there are tables and desks but relatively few chairs, since two of the residents travel in their own. The doorways are 30 inches wide, and the bathroom has grab bars. The hallway pantry has no doors and is curved so that a wheelchair rider needs only to swivel to reach the contents. On the back deck, near the barbecue and raised plant beds, is the hot tub. To get into the tub, Hotchkiss and Kaplan grab on to bars as if latching onto a trapeze, lifting themselves from their chairs and swinging gently into the tub.
Although he has worked on the design of the Whirlwind for more than 15 years, he said, "I don't have the chair I want yet." He continued, "There's not yet a good wheelchair that will get me to a house at the end of a badly rutted road."