Haxted Thinking - Newsletter No 10 / October 2023

Haxted Thinking is a newsletter for anyone interested in how buildings and spaces are designed, made and used.

Edition No. 10: October 2023

"All I knew is that I never wanted to be average."
Michael Jordan

Beware Average

In any design or making endeavour, particularly making space, there is often a temptation to try and cater to as wide an audience as possible. And more than ever collecting as much data as possible is seen as the holy grail to do just that. After all who wants to unnecessarily limit their market? But it’s not the right approach. 
 
There’s a story Todd Rose tells at the beginning of his book. It’s about the US Air Force.

The 1940’s was the dawn of the jet aircraft. Planes had become significantly faster and more complicated to fly, and the US Air Force had an alarming life or death mystery on its hands. Basically its pilots couldn’t keep their planes in the air and no-one could fathom why they kept crashing. One day the US Air Force saw seventeen pilots crash in a single day. With problems ranging from unintended dives, to bungled landings including aircraft-obliterating fatalities, something had to be done very quickly.
 
Initially the military top brass blamed the problem on the airmen in the cockpits. It must be pilot error they said. This seemed a reasonable conclusion as the planes themselves seldom malfunctioned, and the engineers could find no defects. The pilots themselves were angry and confused as they knew that piloting error was not the cause. So if the problem wasn’t human or mechanical error what was it?
 
Eventually attention turned to the design of the cockpit itself. This dated back to 1926 when the Air Force had measured the physical dimensions of hundreds of male pilots and used the data to standardise the dimensions of the cockpit. So the US Air Force, concerned that pilots may have got bigger, authorised the largest ever study of pilots undertaken. At Wright Air Force base in Ohio researchers measured more than 4,000 pilots on each of 140 different dimensions. It included thumb length, crotch height and the distance from a pilot’s eye to his ear. All the data collected was used to create average dimensions for each criteria and a new cockpit design from the hugely improved data set. Everyone believed that this would reduce the number of crashes. 
 
Well everyone except a 23 year old scientist called Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels. Daniels had joined the Air Force straight from Harvard where he had specialised in the study of human anatomy. When Daniels was put to work at Wright Air Force base in Ohio, measuring pilots limbs and hands and waists he wondered how many pilots really were average. So like a good Harvard boy he committed to finding out. Using the size data that had been gathered from exactly 4,063 pilots, he calculated the average of the ten physical dimensions considered to be most relevant for the new design. Thus the  “average pilot” was created which he defined as within the middle 30% of the range of values for each dimension. Next he compared every one of the 4,063 pilots to this “average pilot.” 
 
The consensus amongst his colleagues was that the vast majority of pilots would fit into the average range on most dimensions. After all, these pilots had already been pre-selected because they were generally average sized. The scientists also expected that a sizeable number of pilots would be within the average range on all of the ten dimensions. 
 
When he finished his calculations and tabulated the results, Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels of the United States Air Force was stunned. The number of “average” pilots was zero. ZERO. Out of 4,063 pilots not one airman fitted within the average range on all ten dimensions. Even more astonishing to Daniels was the discovery that if he picked out just 3 of the 10 size dimensions, less than 3.5% of pilots would be average sized on all 3. So the conclusion was incontrovertible. There is no such thing as an average pilot. If the United States Air Force designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, they’d design a cockpit to fit no-one. 
 
So what’s this got to do with us? Well the title of Todd Rose’s book is “The End of Average - How to Succeed in a World that Values Sameness.” It’s a great read and it tells us something really important. If we wish to stand out - whether by creating soulful, uplifting spaces or products or services - the last thing we want is average or sameness. If we try to implement a design to fit the “average person” we design a space to fit no-one. If we design a business solution to fit an average need, or create problem-solving services to resolve average problems, we’ll design something that does neither at all well. And design we must if we want our offerings to move the needle. Design is not decoration or glitter but is the stuff deep in the architecture of all we make, build or sell. It’s authentically what we are as businesses. Steve Jobs intuitively knew this better than anyone and it allowed him to build a revered, cash machine of a business. You don’t need to be an Apple fan to recognise the clarity of his vision.
 
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
 
CNNMoney/Fortune, January 24, 2000
 
Our goal must be to be brave and think specifically about a narrow, specific market. Maybe a market of one. The best artists, writers and musicians are very good at this. How often do we hear them say they created the piece they would want to enjoy? And it helps to question everything. Including whether all the answers we really want can ever be found in a data set, however extensive. For sure constantly questioning everything can be exhausting but curiosity is always the best way forward. It was this curiosity that led Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels of the United States Air Force to solve the complex problem of jet aircraft safety by recognising that if you try and cater for average you’ll end up dealing with a lot of expensive wreckage.
 

What is Haxted?