“When Lieutenant [[Gilbert S. Daniels]], a physical anthropologist, was hired by the US military to design a better cockpit for high-speed aircraft in the early 1950s, the assumption he had to challenge was that you should design a cockpit for ‘the average man’. The idea was that if you took an average of many pilots’ bodily dimensions, you would have a template around which you could design a cockpit – with the instruments visible to most people, and with the controls within easy reach of all but the most unusual physical specimens. “However, Daniels already knew from his measurements of human hands that an average human hand is not a typical human hand, and in the same way he found that an average human body – that is one which is average in a range of dimensions – is surprisingly rare. **When you designed a cockpit for an average man you were designing a cockpit not for everyone, but for a surprisingly rare, or even non-existent, body-type.** Not a single pilot of the 4,000 measured was within the average range on all ten bodily measures.” --- **Tags** -- [[templates]], [[quotes]], [[product-management]] , [[market-research]] , [[problem-with-averages]] , [[alchemy]] , **Source** -- [[202407221554 - B - Alchemy]]