David Aguilar
Most organisations talk about inclusion as a policy and innovation as a pipeline. The harder question is whether the people the system was not designed for can actually build inside it, and whether their work is treated as engineering or as a story. Cultures that cannot answer that question lose both the talent and the output.
David Aguilar is the Andorran bioengineer and Guinness World Record holder behind the Hand Solo LEGO prosthetic arms, who helps organisations see inclusion and invention as the same discipline.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with David Aguilar
- He holds a Guinness World Record for the first functional LEGO prosthetic arm and has built five iterations, MK-I through MK-V, giving any conversation on inclusion a concrete engineering artefact rather than a general narrative.
- He translates a congenital condition, Poland syndrome, into a design problem and a product line under the Hand Solo brand, which reframes accessibility as a market and a capability question for R&D, HR, and product teams.
- He is a UIC Barcelona bioengineering graduate and recipient of the university’s Bioengineering Innovation Prize, so the engineering credibility is not improvised around the story.
- He carries unusual cultural reach for an inventor: winner of LEGO Masters France, subject of the Filmax documentary Mr. Hand Solo (Boston Sci-Fi Festival, Best Documentary Feature), and a face of LEGO’s #RebuildTheWorld global campaign.
- He speaks in English and Spanish and pairs well with technology, healthcare, and culture audiences who want an innovation voice that is not another Silicon Valley founder.
Biography highlights
- Guinness World Records title holder, first functional LEGO prosthetic arm (MK-I); Guinness Hall of Fame inductee.
- Bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering from Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC Barcelona); recipient of the UIC Bioengineering Innovation Prize, 2018.
- Author of Piece by Piece: How I Built My Life (No Instructions Required), with Ferran Aguilar; Amazon Crossing (English), Penguin Random House (Spanish).
- Subject of Mr. Hand Solo (Filmax, 2021), Best Documentary Feature, Boston Science Fiction Film Festival.
- Winner, LEGO Masters France.
- Featured by Great Big Story (CNN Worldwide), WIPO Magazine, and in LEGO’s #RebuildTheWorld global campaign.
Biography
Poland syndrome is a rare congenital condition that prevents the full development of muscles on one side of the body. David Aguilar was born with it, and built his first LEGO prosthesis at nine. By eighteen, working from a LEGO Technic Rescue Helicopter set, he had built MK-I, the first functional LEGO prosthetic arm that Guinness has recognised.
The work has continued in versions, not anecdotes. MK-I to MK-V move from mechanical grabber to motorised five-finger hand controlled by residual-arm movement. He has since built an arm for an eight-year-old and launched Hand Solo as a brand aimed at accessible, affordable prosthetics. UIC Barcelona awarded him its Bioengineering Innovation Prize and a place to complete the degree.
The story travels because it behaves like both engineering and culture. The documentary Mr. Hand Solo won Best Documentary Feature at the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. His memoir Piece by Piece, co-written with his father Ferran, sits on both trade and children’s lists. LEGO cast him in the global #RebuildTheWorld campaign, and he won LEGO Masters France on primetime television.
For serious organisations, the relevance is practical. He gives inclusion teams a product, gives R&D teams a user who is also a builder, and gives leadership audiences a single question to take back to their own operating model: who inside this company is quietly solving a problem we never designed around, and what would it take to give them the bricks?
Key speaking topics
- Inclusive innovation and design
- Accessibility and assistive technology
- Bioengineering and prosthetics
- STEAM education and youth invention
- Resilience through engineering
- Purpose-driven entrepreneurship
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of DEI building an inclusion agenda that produces outputs, not statements.
- R&D, product, and healthcare leaders working on accessibility as a market rather than a compliance question.
- STEAM education programmes, universities, and youth-focused foundations.
- Corporate culture and internal-innovation audiences where the brief calls for a builder rather than a consultant.
Audience outcomes
- A working example of how a constraint becomes a product, not a motivational metaphor.
- A sharper brief for what accessible design looks like when the user is the engineer.
- A named set of artefacts (MK-I to MK-V, Hand Solo) that teams can reference back in their own work.
- A reset on what inclusion programmes should produce, measured in things built rather than campaigns run.
- A concrete answer to what young engineers inside the organisation might do with permission and materials.