Grip, fill

From The Measure of Man; Human Factors in Design (1960) by Henry Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss can be understood as an antecessor of user–centred design, his practice predicated by the fitting of products to human scale. His ubiquity, for me, epitomised by the chiselled handpiece of his Western Electric Model 500 telephone. Never held-held but only beholden–held in past US drama, the squared haptic misfit in a sweaty, harrowed hand.

Or held to the ear by another: Klute (1971), via. Dreyfuss engaged with and extended the application of 'human factors', ergonomics, anthropometrics (as seen in The Measure of Man).

Arzberg by Udo Koch (1991)(coffee pot, plaster, wire), via. Only ever seen one piece first-hand by Koch, at the Goethe-Institut in about 1995. It comprised a group of coffee pots, the plaster nullities spun on an axis and wired together, in and around the form. Around the same time, perhaps a little later, I'd seen the cold turkey mechanical ceiling baby in Trainspotting. Over a longer phase, Michael Powell's mechanical-tangible fantasy sequences. The point being the visible invisible. Hallucinatory ordinary.

A Family of Three at Tea (c. 1727) by Richard Collins, via V&A. First seen in Early English Porcelain by Bevis Hiller (Walker Books, 1992). The cup grips are indicative of both wealth and fashion.

Man and Child Drinking Tea (c. 1720), via.

Matthias Müller's Alpsee (1994), via.

The book Milk and Melancholy (2008) by Kenneth Hayes "considers milk as corporate advertising's moustache of health; as the antiwine; as a complex mixture of fat, protein, corpuscles, lactose, chyle, and plasma that lacks darkness but lacks also the morally pure transparency of crystal; and as the luminous middle term between mercury’s glare and water's transparency". Published by The MIT Press.

MIT Professor (1948–1977) Harold Edgerton's milk drop captures, regarding the iconic Milk Drop Coronet (1957).

De la serie Trautes Heim (1985-86) by Anna and Bernhard Blume, via, where they describe "victims of a sort of ‘medium assault’ by commonplace objects and artefacts".

Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968).

From Selle (1988) by Udo Koch, again via.