Reissue of Humanscale Manual
Selector 4a: Human Strength
Humanscale redux? In collaboration with Henry Dreyfuss Associates, the design bureau IA Collaborative decided to revive the ultra-modernist project Human Scale. The project that was originally published between 1974 and 1981, 'the golden age of American industrial design', claims to provide "access to over 60,000 human factors data points in one easily referenced, user-friendly portfolio of information". By way of contextualising the re-issue for the capitalocene, the Kickstarter webpage has the following:
"The data in Humanscale was drawn from sources published between 1939 and 1981. While populations have evolved and some of the data has changed since then, much of the information contained in these manuals remains relevant today. We share the authors’ vision for Humanscale as fulfilling in an iterative, human-centered design process. In the original materials, they wrote that, “Humanscale is to be considered a starting point for more complete research and is not intended to supplant the more complete references in any specialized field of study,” and that, “models and mock-ups based on the [Humanscale] data should be tried out with the intended users."