When I was in grade 6, my Dad, who was a doctor, came to talk to my whole year level at school. I don’t remember the whole talk – presumably it was part of some kind of health & human development subject – but I vividly remember him asking “Who here thinks they are average?”
Eager, as usual, to be a part of the proceedings, I almost jumped off the floor in my haste to put my hand up. Laughing, he said “Well you’re certainly not average.”
Some kids might have been embarrassed by that. I was oddly proud – which, in hindsight, was probably a key indicator of things to come. But, as he dismissed more and more claims of averageness, I remember him finally telling us that the average Australian had 2.something children, drank some alarmingly high number of beers in a year, and smoked a large number of cigarettes.
I have no idea what his central point was, but it’s vividly poignant today as I sit in my amazingly comfortable new desk chair. For the first time in my life, whether at work or at home, I have a chair that actually fits me. Many of the desk chairs I’ve used have been adjustable, but they’ve never actually been adjustable enough.
I am quite tall (185cm at my tallest, though at 53 it’s very likely I wouldn’t measure that anymore, so I decline to be measured now, in order to maintain my status), and a lot of that height is in my legs, so if you work with the theory that you should be able to sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor, your knees at a right angle, and your thighs parallel to the floor, I have never had a desk chair tall enough, until this one.
Then there’s the position of the lumbar support – that curved bit in the back of the chair, which for me tends to land closer to my butt than to the curved part of my back that it is supposed to support. Not to mention the top of the chair, which is typically nowhere near tall enough for me to rest my head. If there is an actual head rest, it usually pushes my shoulders forward, rather than being at head height. (I have a similar problem in cars.)
My new desk chair feels so good that I can’t help but wonder what pain I might have avoided if I’d had a chair that fitted me years ago.
I find this quite interesting, because I know so many people who are a lot taller than me. Typically we tall folks wind up with back problems sooner rather than later, as we try to adapt ourselves to benches and sinks that are too low, chairs that push us into all sorts of unnatural contortions, knees jammed into the plane seat in front of us, and the toilets that we have to crouch to sit on. Not to mention the inevitable head injuries from low slung decorations in shops. Sure, we can reach things on the top shelf, but we pay a painful price.
It’s not just tall folks, though. Short people also pay a high price for not being “average”. Not just the shelves they can’t reach, but the chairs that expect them to be taller, have longer legs, be shaped differently, the benches that are uncomfortably high, the clothes that drag on the floor, the “eye level” designs that mock them from above their heads.
I used to get angry about all of this, envying the average people who could buy shoes and clothes that fit them, who could sit on the seats without pain, happily working on benches that were just the right height. But I had forgotten my Dad’s lesson. Just as no one in my class was the average Australian, it turns out that there is no such thing as an average human.
Oh, there are very likely folks who are average in one or two measurements, even a handful of them, but when you measure people on a whole range of dimensions and then average them, the resulting set of numbers is some sort of wild composite, not any particular human. (Definitely read this article for more detail on that, it’s fascinating!)
Make a bench suitable for the average person, and it will be too high or too low for most people. Similarly, making things accessible by putting sinks and hand dryers at wheelchair height actively hurts people my height as we have to contort ourselves to use them (and I’ll bet there’s no such thing as a standardised “wheelchair height”, too!), while making them the right height for me and my tall friends makes them too high to be comfortably used by wheelchair users, kids, and short people.
As for clothing… well… that will have to be another post. Clothing for tall, thin people, or short, fat people, or shoes that are actually foot shaped… That’s a whole, much longer rant.
So what is the answer? The answer is to make things adjustable, or build in alternatives. Have your low sink, but provide a higher one too. Make your chair, like mine, configurable to as wide a range of humans as possible. If you’re an employer buying chairs to populate an office, make sure there’s a range, not just one-size-fits-none. Or, better yet, design for actual people, not mathematical myths like “the average person”.
And from a data science point of view, remember that the average does not describe your population. It’s a useful summary, but like all summaries (especially AI generated ones!) it misses out a lot of really important detail. The average might be useful, but it can never describe an individual.
Now that I have a chair that fits properly, I just need to train myself out of the habit of perching on the edge of it, as though I might need to leap out of my seat at any moment. But that’s a whole different post!
Happy chairmas 🙂