Using Silly Putty to advance medical science
It always amazes me when Google tells me something about myself that I had long forgotten.
Before becoming a product designer, I was going to be a doctor… not the Doogie Howser type, but more like Dr Phil – without Oprah. I studied with Carleton University’s Pain Project in the psychology department. 
Even back then, I always tried to be innovative – something not always appreciated by medical scientists.
I wanted to create a method by which migraine sufferers could better communicate the location and qualities of their head pain. My “big idea” was to have migraine patients draw areas of pain onto a three-dimensional head model covered in silly putty. I would then cut out those areas to be measured using a computer stylus. The cut-out pieces would then be replaced and the head cleaned – ready for another patient. With help from my advisor, Dr. Jim Campbell, I wrote up this experiment as a research paper which got published in the medical journal Headache.
My biggest thrill was being the first and only to have the words “Silly Putty” published in a serious medical journal… Good thing for science, I moved on to study human factors instead.
Just like patent referencing, everytime someone refers the silly putty paper, Google dregs it up for me!
Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain
Volume 27 Issue 3 Page 134 – March 1987
doi:10.1111/j.1526-4610.1987.hed2703134.xVolume 27 Issue 3
Spatial Distribution of Head Pain as a Factor in Migraine Experience J. F. Campbell , Mitch A. Brisebois, and Nicole M. G. Hughes
SYNOPSIS By means of a life-size three-dimensional head model, 12 subjects reporting the symptoms of classic migraine described the spatial distribution of pain at its most intense. A correlational analysis indicated that a decrease in the surface area of pain was related to an increase in the salience of such symptoms as bilateral pain onset, the spread of pain to include the whole head, increased olfactory sensitivity, excessive sweating, and teeth or jaw aches, in the subjects’ experience of headache. Concurrently, subjects reporting the smaller areas tended to describe the pain as “sharp” and “piercing”, while those reporting larger areas tended to describe the pain as “pounding” and “heavy”.
You’ll have to get a big ball of Silly Putty and copy each page of the report using it, and post the results here.
Seriously, that’s all I thought the stuff was good for as a kid: being the poor man’s photocopier/mimeograph machine.