The Incredible Shrinking Man

NASA is obsessed by the immense costs of putting things into space. Every extra pound sets them back thousands of dollars. That’s why it is perhaps not surprising that researcher Don Platt reports that several space technology centers investigate the possibility to shrink whatever goes into that rocket, including the astronauts. It’s not just the [...]

Our projected height for The Incredible Shrinking Man is 50 centimeters. With that height, and the same proportions its weight will be around 1,7 kg. But how does that translate to a shoe or ring size? And what about the volume of our brains and liver, or the size of an eye? It’s time we [...]

For some people the most exciting consequence of shrinking the human body is not that we’ll save resources, or the new abundance of space and the challenge of redesigning most of our things. What keeps them busy is if at 50 centimeters and 2 kilograms it may finally become possible to fly.
At the end of [...]

In a response to our ambition to create a 50 cm research doll, Australian designer Guy Keulemans points out that “the idea of a 50cm puppet exploring tiny urban space is interesting, simply because we are running out of regular sized spaces to explore. The great age of pioneers discovering new continents and lost worlds is long [...]

Airlines have tried to compensate the increase in passenger size and weight by adding extra taxes and designing larger and more fuel efficient airplanes but surely there are limits to how big our vehicles can become. Shrinking on the other hand would open up a world of opportunities for retrofitters. Redesigning and repurposing our [...]

As people start shrinking, Earth and everything on it will proportionally, grow in size. This growth of space and resources is actually one of the main reasons to consider shrinking as a sustainable way of inhabiting the earth. At the same time it holds the the biggest challenges. How do we reinvent a world in [...]