This post is by Lora Taylor, a 2025-2026 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress.
Engineering challenges encourage creativity, but they can easily become exercises in personal preference or aesthetics. One of the most important aspects of engineering is designing solutions that meet the needs of other people. Creating a design for someone else helps students develop empathy, consider constraints, and recognize that successful engineering begins with understanding a user’s needs.
Prosthetic design offers a powerful context for exploring these ideas. Prosthetic devices help people perform everyday tasks, work, feel more at ease in public, participate in activities they enjoy, and navigate the world more independently. Because every user has different goals and challenges, prosthetic design demonstrates that engineering solutions must be adapted, tested, and refined to fit individual needs.
Primary sources allow students to investigate how prosthetic technology has evolved over time. Historical photographs, drawings, and sketches reveal how engineers continually improved designs through observation, experimentation, user feedback, and redesign.
Show students the image below and encourage them to analyze it closely by noticing the small details.
Invite students to make observations:
- What details do you notice first?
After students have had time to examine the image, encourage reflection and questioning:
- What materials do you think were used to build this device?
- What needs was the inventor trying to address?
- What tasks might this prosthetic allow someone to perform?
- What challenges might a user experience while using it?
To broaden the investigation, invite students to compare additional examples of prosthetic design. They might examine the facial masks created by sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd for veterans injured during World War I and consider both the physical and emotional needs these devices were designed to address.
Students can also analyze A Successful Workman, a photograph of a Civil War veteran using prosthetic legs, a photograph of a man welding with a prosthetic arm, an eighteenth-century design of a prosthetic arm and hand, and an image of a man using prosthetic hands to play croquet. Each example highlights different engineering challenges and demonstrates how prosthetic technology has been adapted for work, recreation, mobility, and daily life.
Comparing these sources encourages students to consider how different users require different solutions. They may notice differences in materials, mechanisms, comfort, appearance, and function. Ask them to select one or more of the sources and consider: How is this design similar to and different from modern prosthetic designs?
After analyzing the sources, challenge students to become engineers themselves and create designs and prototypes that are specific to modern users’ needs:
- How can the successes of historical designs be combined with today’s materials and technologies to create prosthetics that meet both functional and aesthetic needs?
- What are new tasks, activities, and lifestyles that modern prosthetics may need to support?
By combining primary source analysis with hands-on engineering challenges, students discover that innovation is both a technical and a human process. Engineers must be creative problem-solvers, thoughtful listeners, and careful observers. Prosthetic design helps students understand that the most successful engineering solutions begin with empathy and are strengthened through testing, feedback, and continuous improvement.
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