following up on the design challenge
An automotive designer wrote and said some car manufacturers try to design for the 1 percentile female and 99 percentile male, but that is rare. Small cars often stop below the 95 percentile male level and many cars don't adjust below the 5 percentile female level. Some safety features perform poorly with occupants outside normal ranges and early airbags in some cars only performed well in the 15 to 85 percentile male range. The very tall are left with a very limited range of cars that fit while those who are short sometimes have to resort to pedal extenders and reduced visibility.
An interesting feature of a range extended or pure electric vehicle is greater potential design freedom for the passenger compartment. It is possible cars will able to accommodate a greater range of human variation and provide better safety. This probably won't appear in early designs, but there is great potential.
The clothing industry has unrealized potential. Of course high sigma people - the tall, the short, the heavy, unusual proportions, etc .. - have problems, but compromises made for mass production and variations of the process nearly guarantee a poor fit for large percentages of the population.
Twenty years ago people were excited by the prospect of size capture and automated clothing manufacture. You would step into a scanning booth and an accurate 3d model of your body would be created. This file could be sent to clothing manufactures to produce clothes that actually fit. I was involved in a project at Bell Labs that addressed some of the issues with shoe and jeans manufacturers. The technology has been around for about a decade and a few businesses have tried and failed. The problem is companies can make large profits using hyper low-wage workers in the third world. The distribution chain hasn't changed much and it is still very inefficient, so there is great focus on cheap manufacture.
With clothing most of us suffer from compromise fits. The wealthy can have custom clothing crafted. Some people have to have a bit of tailoring done. A few companies have emerged that require a larger number of measurements that you would normally expect and then use a combination of computer controlled cutting machines and premium labor (still in low wage countries) to make clothing with a better fit - an example is the Indian company makeyourownjeans. (I've never used them, but a friend reports two great fits and one above average in three tries)
Would people pay a premium for higher quality clothing that actually fit? Ideally the designer, manufacturer and buyer would be directly connected, but getting past the point where people browse in brick and mortar stores and see how they look in the clothes in real time may be the greatest stumbling block. Still - a huge amount of money is spent on shoes and clothing ... you would think a focus on better sizing might pay off somewhere in the future.
At least people don't have the size range of dogs...
Comments