Sizegiver - how to measure the world

This special episode of the Standards podcast is an in-depth conversation with the BSI's Matthew Chiles about sizegiver - a project which explores the use of standards in an unusual and interesting way.

A sizegiver is an object placed into a photograph to enable judgement of another object’s size or scale. They are mass-produced, designed and standardized objects, which are iconic and familiar, but also commonplace. Examples of sizegivers include coins, bottle caps, paperclips, matchsticks, coke cans, or golf balls. They create object-object relationships, which communicate scale faster than a ruler, but are are often strange, playful and unusual.

Corinne explains how sizegiving is becoming an international visual shorthand to describe the meaning of images, tell stories and bring together communities.