Hand grasp and finder grip
Posted: May 20th, 2008 | 2 Comments »Taken form Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss (pictures found here):
Why do I blog this? just find intriguing to look at these anthropometric representation of hands (and the physical dimensions) and think about how they can be connected to the user experience of tangible interfaces (using gestures for example). How does the physical dimensions can count in the effort to create a relationship between a physical object, users
and digital representations. Certainly good elements Julian, innit?
What I enjoy most about these diagrams are the way they assert “people” through a operational, instrumental rendering. It’s the one of only a few, equally bland ways in which engineering and the sciences, generally, have to “talk” about people and their practices. Ergonomics, human-factors, medicine — everything, really, needs a language to describe the people-practices to which these disciplines collide. This is a perfect example of an attempt to describe and represent “human form,” while avoiding complications of “people.”
[...] Nicolas’ post the other day got me thinking. After my first job as an engineer, I wanted to find ways to do work that had more direct implications for people. I found things like Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Human Interaction. They had the word “human” in them, so I figured this was the engineering way to involve itself in more directly people-focused things. A year of work in the Industrial Engineering department and the Human Computer Interface Lab (HITLab) at the University of Washington and I mostly found that this meant things that were closer to the images above. A rather instrumented, statistics-based, operational model of “humans” (not people) to shape and inform engineering work. Grips. Airline seats. Load bearing capabilities. Key-press force limits. That kind of thing. This wasn’t the kind of thing I imagined, but it was a useful experience, to understand the ways in which various engineering disciplines develop a vocabulary and set of practices that involve social actors, like “humans” or “people.” [...]