I’m a big guy who likes small things. “Big” is not just a vague, subjective call. I’m 5cm short of 2 meters tall, and 100 kilo’s. Anthropometric studies peg my size at the 95th percentile for North America. (This is especially convenient for consumer product development, since it’s typical to try to cover 90 percent of the bell curve of body size variations. Along with a 5th percentile woman, the two of us can cover the spread.)

Small things are a minor theme in my life. I drive a smart car that’s half the length of some cars on the road and half the weight of MINI Cooper. The Cross Ion pen in my pocket is about 4 inches long folded up. I’m typing this on an Apple keyboard that’s about 11 inches wide and mostly about 1/4 inch thick… I could go on….

One of the first, if not the first, Constant Camber sailboats designed by Jim Brown and Dick Newick was christened “SIB”, for “small is beautiful”. To my mind and eye small is beautiful. Not just as a manifestation of form-follows-function minimalism, but also as a result of the “reduce” component of the “reduce, reuse, recycle” imperative. Small things just take less resources to produce, maintain, and dispose of. So small is green, too.

I guess I’d never fit in Texas…. maybe in Japan, though. Well, I suppose I’d stand out there in more ways than one! I don’t think that small equals less; it just means different design decisions, different values, and different results. Treehugger has a brief article on a nice example of this: New York Times On Living in 435 Square Feet : TreeHugger”

Tags: small, smallisbeautiful, reduce, green