Niels Diffrient died June 8, age 84. The pioneer of human factors and ergonomics brought optimal dimensions not just to products he designed but to many others that relied on his templates of the body.
I had communicated with him just a few weeks ago, trying to set up an appearance for him this fall. We discussed the design of infotainment systems in automobiles—a problematic area of design, to say the least. Interface, interaction, user experience, ergonomics, human factors---we can’t even neatly name it but it was all his terrain.
He will be seen as a pioneer of design’s shift from thinking about shaping objects to shaping the experience of the person who uses them. He may have worked with numbers and templates, but his overriding desire was to make the world better for living human beings.
He wore an air of cosmopolitan wisdom. It was a surprise, then, to hear he had been born in rural Star, Mississippi. The family migrated north to seek jobs in the factories of Detroit. His father worked on the line at General Motors; Niels ended up at Cranbrook and entered the Saarinen/Eames/Bertoia circle. Then, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, he arrived in Italy in time for the high period of Italian modern design. He worked with Marco Zanuso.
Back in the states, he found a job with Henry Dreyfuss, where he continued the firm’s pioneering efforts in ergonomics in the Humanscale standards. Later, for the company also called Humanscale, he put these principles into practice in office chairs.
His autobiography, Confessions of a Generalist, published last year, reveals a life with adventures far beyond lab research. While designing aircraft interiors for TWA he met Howard Hughes, the mad billionaire.
He watched technology change. He had defined the proper angle of the keyboard and the relationship of chair to desk. But now computer were laptops and used on laps, wherever bodies bent or lounged. Keyboards were flat--even the finger friendly scoops of keyboard keys have been abandoned in the desire for abstract beauty.
I remember attending a party a few years ago with Diffrient. The music was loud and the crowd jammed tight. Twenty somethings held drinks in one hand and texted with the other—communicating in a mode that was eons from the proper ergonomic angle of chair or back. But he simply shook his head in bemusement. His interest was not in devices but in people and their constantly unfolding nature. That is the real human factor.
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