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Here, again, it is easy to be very concrete. For I am an excellent example; a well educated, rather informed individual, with good health insurance, interested in prevention, a staff member of several local hospitals, and a friend and colleague of many eminent physicians. It has been almost thirty-eight years since my polio and thirty-three since my accident and yet I have never, in the over thirty years since my rehabilitation was 'completed', been called in by any of my orthopaedists or prosthetists for a check-up or to discuss new ways I could do things or new devices I could use. I do not mean, of course, that I have not seen these people but rather that I only did so when something was awry and then, quite naturally, we all focussed on the trouble. Anything new that I do or use today I learn from friends or journals. Now some might argue that this is the road to self-help. I would argue that it is haphazard rehabilitation: a consigning of me and many like me to the 'we have done all we could' category. I am not claiming callousness. I am claiming that there exists a system built on certain assumptions that prevents the rehabilitation world from ever really knowing if it has done all it can.

With such global considerations as a context, I want to examine the effect of similar assumptions on the direct application of rehabilitation technology. An issue of great concern in the design of activities as well as devices for those with disabilities is safety: the protection of the individual from unnecessary harm. While the wish to protect vulnerable people from danger is a worthy goal, it is often achieved at too great a cost. Loring Mandel wrote of this in a play Do Not Go Gently into This Good Night (Mandel, 1967). Melvyn Douglas portrayed a retired cabinet maker who for 'his own good' was placed in a nursing home. His breaking point occurred when the staff refused to allow him to use the available wood working machinery because it was too dangerous. He rebelled. He claimed that he had the right as a human being to run the risk of injuring or losing his finger. Since they disagreed, he quit the home. Most of us are not so fortunate. We do not have the power to quit. The authorities will not let us leave. And we have no place to go.

There is a body of psychological literature which claims that risk taking is essential to the growth and development of all individuals. Robert Perske summed it up best when he concluded:

"The world in which we live is not always, safe, secure and predictable. It does not always say 'please' or 'excuse me'. Everyday there is a possibility of being thrown up against a situation where we may have to risk everything, even our lives. This is the REAL world. We must work to develop every human resource within us in order to prepare for these days. To deny any retarded person his fair share of risk experiences is to further cripple him for healthy living. "(Perske 1972, P. 26).

I spent a day not so long ago With a man with paraplegia who races cars and sometime before that with a man with quadriplegia who was learning how to ski. Both of these are activities I would not have engaged in BEFORE I got polio! Without trying for a moment to denigrate the achievement and courage involved in their doing this, what else I think they are doing is putting some risk back into their lives where so much has been denied them. Hoping there are no police safety officials within hearing, I realise my risk defiance comes from a continual neglect of seat belts and an almost congenital inability to keep to the fifty-five mile per hour speed limit. Given that I travel a lot, I think I am on the way to collecting a speeding ticket in every State.

In short, if society does not let us have normal risk in our lives, many of us will go to extreme lengths to establish it. Thus, to design an environment or device to prevent any kind of risk may go too far. It may not produce a real life but a mirage of one. There is human dignity in risk. There can be dehumanising indignity in safety.

Technology can also do too much for those of us with disabilities. The machines technology creates may achieve such completeness that they rob us of our integrity by making us feel useless. There is an example of this in a very different area but it has relevance here. Many years ago when the 'convenience food' business was in its most expansive phase, the manufacturers discovered that where cake mixes were concerned, they had gone too far. Early in their marketing all the ingredients were included. All one needed to do was to add water, stir and then bake; the same formula that worked so successfully with soups. But there was customer resistance and sales faltered. Their market research teams went to work and soon they discovered that cake making contained some important elements that differed from soup preparation. Baking had more intimate connotations; it had associations with being 'fresh' and even 'special'. As a result, the manufacturers quickly altered their strategy. They not only instructed the customer to add fresh eggs but on the sides of the box they gave hints on how to improve the recipe; how to make it more special, more one's own.