Man is the measure of all things

Abstract

Our system of measures referred to human proportions and human perception, as Protagoras stated, is “Man is the measure of all things”. In this paper, we present an overview of the measure of Man as a travel on time from the point of view of the past historical development to the future with the insight of different disciplines such as Anthropology, Ergonomics, and Human Factors. The key concept is that all the most famous scholars, architects artists and philosophers that have been working on system of human measures such as Polyclitus, Vitruvius and Leonardo until Le Corbusier are designers of Human canonical proportion and they design the things with the measure of their “Canonical Human”. We are looking to create a design with the differentiation of the measure of the “Real Humans”. The real human is not a canon but can be measured applying methodological international standards to obtain an anthropological database and to represent human variability on the base of standardized statistics for ergonomic design. This essay presents the result of 50 years of study at the Laboratory of Anthropometry and Ergonomics in the Turin University (Italy), applying Anthropometry of the real human evolution and Earth adaptation as result of the main factors: “gravity”, also investigated on context without this factor that is in “Outer Space”. In the Laboratory, researches were conduced not only to study past and present human populations, but also to deduce potential future expectations.