Discover the impact of male gender bias in design, as we unveil its consequences and advocate for change. Explore fields shaped by this bias and join us in creating an inclusive design world that celebrates diversity and creativity when all voices are heard.
@LucyLastic Hi again! I’ve update the article with your TLDR and provided a link to your comment! Thanks again, you’ve been a great help.
I was wondering what cool things you won’t go into here, because I’m strangely interested in car safety now xD
(This was a big deal because developing a new crash test dummy takes a really long time and costs an insane amount of money. This is something else that I find cool but won’t go into here, however because female test dummies come after the male ones they are, and continue to be, more advanced.)
Your last paragraph is also interesting, I suppose it makes sense that different countries have different cars (and therefor crashes), but it’s not something I’ve consciously thought about (I’m in the land of bikes and don’t own a car).
If by the land of bikes you mean Netherlands, then you’ve got TASS! They sometimes get to crash test odd things there like railway carriages, lamp posts, and they once accidentally fired a car into a tree. I’ve done a bit of work there in the past :-)
Anyway, the development of crash test dummies way back in the past used to be pretty random. There were wooden ones, some testing used wax dummies dropped from above with a pendulum, some low-speed testing had volunteers (there’s a video on youtube somewhere of one of them being handed a cigarette after the crash as the first order of business). When things started to get serious a lot of research was taken from military and aviation testing, but to bring things up to date the Thor dummy was built from the ground-up to be for car testing … with that they looked at injury statistics and decided what sensors to put in. It was made with analog instrumentation (with hundreds of cables coming out, looking vaguely like something from a cyberpunk anime) with the intention to fit onboard computers to it when technology was sufficiently advanced. Now all the data recording is handled in-dummy with it’s own battery so if a cable gets cut the data isn’t lost.
The new female Thor has a much better spine / abdomen, with gel-filled pressure sensors which were originally developed by the French government to go in child dummies. Compared to the male version it’ll give much more meaningful information about abdominal injuries, I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one!
Crash test lamp posts?! I’m imagining lamp posts being shot from cannons now 😂
It was an interesting read, thanks again!
Not quite as fun as that, more like put up a new design of lamp post and then throw a car at it to see if anything dangerous happens. Same thing is done with road barriers, which is fun sometimes when the design isn’t quite right and it serves as more of a ramp than a barrier