Do Dimensions Matter?: Design Mysteries Series

And why do we measure stuff?

Societies depend on measurement to quantify and control the sale of products and services, so everyone agrees on the nature of a pound of coffee. Another reason to measure stuff is to obey the law. This fishing ruler from 1953 lists the fish and the legal limits in both size and quantity. Laws and rules governing what size fish we catch and the quantity we can keep change every year depending on what seems appropriate to scientists and researchers and The State Fish & Game Departments.

The amazing thing about measurement is the number of things that had to be invented in order for it to exist at all. It is definitely a chicken and egg thing again, we definitely were building things before measurement, but when did measurement become important? Was it for duplication? Was it the need to orient things in certain ways to the stars? I’m guessing it started with trade and then migrated to building and then recording which may be led to language and numbers. All just speculation.

But do designers really care how big or small something is?

In his book The Modulor, Le Corbusier explores measurement based on the human body that is reflected in indigenous architecture and products. His conclusion is Modulor based on a combination of human measurements, the Fibonacci Series and The Golden Section. Le Corbusier described it as a “range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things”. No one besides Le Corbusier ever used The Modulor measuring system, because it is too esoteric and needlessly complicated to be useful. Also, I think it confuses the relationship between dimensions and measurement. Like the separation of church and state, measurement and dimensions need to be seen as separate and different ways of looking at the world. The Modulor should be of interest to designers because of Corbusier’s it helps explain some of the formal ideas he was working with. It is said the windows in Ronchamp are based on Le Modulor. So as a design methodology Le Modulor works.

Corbusier used the dimensions of Le Modulor to create his designs, thus designers their own particular dimensional analysis to create things. I’m not sure it matters what “system” designers use to generate concepts and solutions to design problems. Measurement is what societies use to control the things created. If this is true then designers should really care about dimensions, not measurements. So what is the difference between a dimension and a measurement? Dimensions in my view are what define something, how big it is, including scale, how something relates to something else is how I define scale. The statement “The Statute of Liberty is much bigger than I am”, defines how most people think of scale. We don’t know exactly how much bigger it is, just that it is bigger.

Enough math! What’s fascinating about this idea of dimensions and measurement is that differing measurement systems from different parts of the world seem to agree on the fundamentals of measurement and come close to being exactly the same. The English ruler consists of inches, feet and can be referred to as a yardstick because it is one yard long. Maybe the yard refers to fabric but it could also refer to yards as an agricultural measurement. The shakkanhō ruler of Japan divides the shaku into ten suns and is three shaku long equaling one ken or the width of a tatami, the architectural measurement for a building.

The basis for both rulers is transferring ideas from “ideas” to reality in a measured way. Measurement allows us to replicate and duplicate and coordinate the thoughts of designers. They are the way society keeps track of ideas, inventions and just about everything else we think of or do.

Why not teach measurement?

In design schools there are courses in 2D Design & 3D Design, the D stands for dimensional, another reason that I think dimensions are more important to designers and measurements are more important to societies. Designers think dimensionally not in the minutiae of measurement. Dimensions are needed to explore, they are undefined for a reason………they are indefinable. Space, like outer space, is indefinable and impossible to measure, although we are trying, Interior space is definable but undeniably to every designer it is limitless in possibilities and dimensions. Of course, at some point all those brilliant ideas must be measured and recorded, so the genius can be built.

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Design Mysteries Series
Bruce Hannah 2018©