Almost everything that makes a chair comfortable or unbearable was decided by a handful of measurements, and they interact. Here are fifteen.
1. Seat Height Decides Everything Else
The distance…
Corrugated board is one of those inventions so completely ordinary that it is hard to see as an invention at all. Something like a hundred billion boxes are made from…
There is a category of object assembled entirely without fixings, and basketry is the oldest and most widespread example.
Almost everything else made of many parts is held together by…
There is a container that solves several problems at once, which is why it lasted for two thousand years and why nothing replaced it until very recently.
The problems are…
There is a useful test of how hard something is to make: look at what people did before they had it.
Before metal needles, sewing was done with points made…
There is a tool so ordinary that almost nobody has considered how it works, and the answer turns out to be more particular than expected.
The obvious model is a…