ABSTRACT
There is a true story told about the legendary American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, author of The Measure of Man, still the standard work on human factors (or ergonomics) in design today. As a young man in the early 1930s, Dreyfuss was sent from New York to Iowa to discover why a brand new, beautifully decorated RKO movie palace was not drawing the punters, while the local, unventilated fleapit down the road was full to the rafters every night. Dreyfuss was mystified. He lowered the prices, ran triple features and gave away free food from the cafeteria but still nobody would come. For three days he stood outside the movie house watching the reactions of people wandering by. Then he removed the expensive deep-pile scarlet carpet from the lobby and replaced it with a simple rubber mat. Immediately, like a miracle, the RKO movie palace was full. The problem, as Dreyfuss rightly identified, was that the good Iowa farming folk didn’t want to mess up that gorgeous carpet with their muddy boots.
