Designing for Designers

A designed product should be adapted for the human form. But are we designing for the average human body proportions or a specific group. Such questions and the necessary measurement data in the past was only available through piece mail sources. That was until the 70s when partners Bill Crookes and Niels Diffrient, from design firm Henry Dreyfuss & Associates, produced the Humanscale. The Humanscale assembled an extensive wealth of body measurements of men, women, and children. By rotating a disk on the side of the Humanscale you are able to adjust for ergonomic changes and percentile differences such as age.

The Humanscale was the essential tool for Industrial Designers but has largely been surpassed by databases of ergonomic data loaned to design firms. The Humanscale became a collectors item, but has now been revived in production. A company named Westra is now manufacturing reprints for sale.

It is an interesting phenomenon when products from the past gain a new resurgence. Even more interesting is when it happens to design for designers, such as Humanscale. Today's world is ever more lost in the era of digitization. Physical tooling however should always have an invaluable place in design.

For more on Humanscale visit https://www.wired.com/story/humanscale-the-classic-design-tool-gets-a-second-life/