Category: Prototyping

Abundance Fantasies: Spherical Soup

October 30, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

The Disproportionate Restaurant investigates how downsizing the human species will affect our relationship with food. Over the past years we did a number of experiments, including abundance fantasies such as the Ostrich BBQ and Sunflower Table and explorations of new ingredients and possibilities such as…

Hourglass, Banana, or Spoon?

March 31, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Even within a speculative research such as The Incredible Shrinking Man it is difficult to imagine what the average human body will look like if we decide to shrink to 50 centimetres. However, based on the specific physical adaptations to environment and our various diets…

Fish Representatives

February 16, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

In most genetics research, Homo sapiens is represented by small fish like Danio rerio (zebrafish)  and Oryzias latipes (Japanese rice fish). Both are important model organisms, representing man in developmental genetics, neurophysiology and biomedicine. When we tinker with genes what happens to the fish is…

Overcoming the Height Gap

September 13, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

There’s a 40% difference in height between the shortest 5 percentile and the tallest 5 percentile of the adult human population. That puts humans amongst the Earth’s most hypervariable species. Shrinking the body will create an even greater height gap, Younger generations will be shorter…

Six Cities / Empty World

June 20, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Earth is turning into a global city. Over half the world’s population lives in urbanised areas and those cities are taking up more and more space.  Most of the rest of the world is organised to supply food and resources. Even so, cities are the most…

Raspberry Explosion

April 1, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

One of the most important reasons to shrink the human species is that we’ll shrink ourselves into a world of abundance. At 50 cm we’ll only need about 2% of the resources we need now. A simple grape will have the size of a mango. A…

Messengers of the Small Truth

March 4, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Growth is a human default mode. Every individual, every reproduced cell and in fact every selfish copy of our DNA, intends to proliferate. From an evolutionary perspective such a default mode made perfect sense in the year 4.000 BC when the world population of Homo…

Poultry/House

February 11, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we decide to shrink the human species our livestock may need to shrink with us. We’ll only consume about 2 to 10% of the food we consume today. The meat of one chicken could easily feed 100 people and one egg alone would be enough to…

Ostrich BBQ

December 10, 2011 By arne hendriks 4

One of the most promising advantages of shrinking the human species would be the abundance of food. A single chicken could feed up to 100 people. But perhaps it’s not just a matter of abundance. We might encounter some unsuspected differences in the way we…

Of Snell Mice and Men

April 17, 2011 By arne hendriks 1

Mice and men display striking genetic similarities in hormone dependent growth disturbances. If a mouse responds in a certain way to a genetic mutation, chances are that a human will respond in similar fashion. The first dwarf mouse was discovered by Nobel Prize winner George Snell in…

Why 50 cm?

March 28, 2011 By arne hendriks 1

Why do we propose to make The Incredible Shrinking Man 50 centimeters? Why not 100 centimeters, or 75? The first reason is that 50 centimeters, even if very small, is not hard to imagine since it is the average height of newborn babies. However, newborn…

Bantam Astronauts

March 24, 2011 By arne hendriks 1

Perhaps it’s our desire to go to Mars that in the end will lead to smaller human beings. 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…

The Stats on T.I.S.M.

January 8, 2011 By arne hendriks 5

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…

Can Shrinking Man Fly?

December 12, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

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…

The Tiny Frontier

October 27, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

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…

Transport Retrofit

July 18, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

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…

From Macro to Micro

April 28, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

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…