DINED is working on a new tool!
If you have used DINED before, you probably already know that people’s body dimensions can vary greatly. With the current DINED tools, a user is able to use anthropometric data about this variation in a smart way. However, some sub-groups deviate too much from the rest, making it difficult to include them within the boundaries of your design.
For this reason, Plus-sized men and women commonly deal with misfit problems, for example during their shopping spree. Their body dimensions are more likely to fall outside of a normal distribution, as tissue-related body measures do not correlate well with common measures as stature. Besides discomfort, it causes social problems because of stigmatisation (Chisosa DF, 2020). And that while globally 39% of the population is overweight and more than 1/3 adults in the US are even classified as obese (Ritchie, H., 2017)
We are currently working on an interactive Plus-size anthropometrics tool, in which we allow users to extract detailed information about the variation within and between different body-types and other variables. You could for example select only pear-shaped women in your study. The tool will use the extensive databases of CAESAR, which we already use in the mannequin tool.
Now the fashion industry is definitely not the only potential use for this tool. Think of the design of office furniture, MRI scanners or a rollercoaster safety bar (https://www.dia.com/blog/live/fat-at-a-theme-park/).
How would you use this type of data?