Body category

"I ran a design consultancy firm for 20 years and specialized in the design of products that fit the body. So sports equipment, primarily."

Roger Ball in Hong Kong recalls a big surprise he had coming when he started moving some products for winter sports.

"I became an expert in helmet design," he says. "And it was during a project for Burton Snowboards in 1996. I designed the first snowboard helmet, and the three big markets for snowboarding are USA, Europe and Japan. We went Number One in the USA, Number One in Europe -- but we couldn't sell anything in Japan."

"So they asked me to come over and meet with the Japanese pro rider team. And I met with them and I said, 'So what's the problem? You don't like the color? You don't like the materials? You don't like the look?'

"They said, 'No, we like all that. We just can't put it on our heads.'

"And I said, 'What do you mean?'

"And they said, 'Well, you know, we have a different shaped head from you.'

"And I thought they were kidding me," Ball says with a laugh, remembering the moment he'd stumbled onto a major marketing design discovery. "I mean, you can never tell with Japanese snowboarders, can you?"

In fact, however, the Japanese athletes had introduced him to a genuine dilemma facing head-apparel designers, an East-West divide that two this day many people still are surprised to hear about.

"Turned out they were right!" Ball says. "My client said, 'Well, we don't know what's going on with these guys, but you need to design a helmet for them.'

"So at that point, I did what I usually do. In a design process, when you're designing a piece of equipment, when it's the human body, you follow form. So I looked into this. I have a pretty extensive collection of contacts in the business, in the testing end, in the science end. I asked them all.  'Doesn’t anybody know anything about this different-shaped-head thing?' A lot of them said they'd heard about it, but there was no shape," no model with the right specifications on which to base an appropriate design.

"Fast-forward to my arrival in Hong Kong five years ago, they asked me about the research missing on this issue. Now, the Chinese people know about it, well" even if Western apparel makers, designers and consumers don't. "It's not just the head, either. The feet, too, shoes don't fit. All kinds of things. And what this means is you have to start at Square One," and build an understanding of the size-and-shape trends for a consumer base

"During the SARS outbreak of 2003," Ball adds, "even face-masks became an issue. There was genuine fear triggered by the fact that Western-made masks didn't fit Asian faces well."

SizeChina has spent three years generating a large-scale 3-D survey of the Chinese head and face, using high-resolution laser-scanned data collected from 2,500 volunteers from six provinces of mainland China. This anthropological database, then, proves the distinctions between the shape of the average Chinese and Western head.

The results of the study are available to designers in physical head- and faceforms, and 3D files that can be imported into design software platforms.

"And you know," says Ball, "I was in Holland last year and talked to a couple of women  who had been in the hat business for about a hundred years -- well, their family had been in the business for a hundred years," he corrects himself -- "and they told me that they thought Indian heads were probably closer to, though a bit smaller than, the Asian heads.

"And in my research, I looked at colonial powers' records during the age of Darwin and all, and this information really has been around in one form or another. But no one had ever actually documented these differences. Now, we've done it."

Designed by:
Roger Ball, Hong Kong, China.

Produced by:
Certiform™.

Additional credits:
Innovation and Technology Commission of the Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; Hong Kong School of Design; The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Strategic Sports; New Era Cap Co.

www.sizechina.com
www.certiform.org

Written by Porter Anderson