Insights
Wired, Fast Co. & More Feature IA Reissue of Iconic Design Tools
As featured by Wired, Fast Company, Monocle, Arch Daily, Curbed, AIGA Eye on Design and more – IA Collaborative, through its Ventures program – has completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to bring back and reissue a legendary piece of design history: the Humanscale manuals.
As human-centered designers at IA Collaborative, we’ve long been enamored with the Humanscale manuals – the ultimate tools to design for people. In the golden age of American industrial design, Henry Dreyfuss Associates knew that there was more to design than just looking good. Products had to be good, crafted to work with the people who use them.
With this in mind, HDA designers Niels Diffrient and Alvin R. Tilley created Humanscale, including its ingenious data selectors, providing access to over 60,000 human factors data points in one easily referenced, user-friendly “portfolio of information.” Never before or since has there been such a complete and usable compendium of human factors data. Each page is a master class in information design – and this was before computer layouts.
The Humanscale reissue campaign clearly struck a chord with designers and appreciators around the world, raising a total of $326,109 from 1,704 backers and surpassing campaign stretch goals. As of January 2018, IA Collaborative has reproduced and printed the complete set of Humanscale manuals and distributed to campaign backers around the world.