WHERE DID THE BODY GO? RE‐FRAMING HUMAN SCALE

Abstract

Scale can be considered as both a cartographic tool for design that allows designers to work with large scale objects such as buildings and urban spaces. However, scale is equally a relational understanding of the sensorial and perceptive reactions of the human body to its surrounding environment. As designers it is important to not only consider the human body as a measuring stick for dimensioning space according to standardised solutions and building codes, but also in a sensorial capacity as a perceptual tool for embodied experiences. Especially in ‘large scale’ design, the human body is easily lost in the zooming out through scale as a design tool. Therefore, this paper suggests a re-framing of human scale that turns attention to the ambiguous invitations environments offer for human action. In this way, we extend an invitation to designers to remember the human body across scales of design.