Standards

Abstract

One of Man’s most distinctive characteristics is that wherever he has settled he has started creating order. Weights and measures and units of quantity and price are introduced, and as he sets about organizing it the whole of life becomes subject to standardization. In the same way standards have come into engineering. As a rule, the young designer has little liking for them. The more independent his personality, and the more pronounced his will, the harder he will collide with standards. He finds that here—long before his arrival on the scene—the whole area has been mapped out, and he is not as free to manoeuvre as he expected. At every turn he comes up against standards, existing arrangements, predetermined dimensions—all of which force him to depart from his original ideas in one direction or another. To him they all represent a sizable obstacle, and he is not at all sure that the disadvantages offered by these standards are balanced out by corresponding advantages; anyone surveying the whole field of standards, and aware of their shortcomings, will have some sympathy for this view.