If you want to design a piece of furniture, you start with a sketch. But at some point you've got to get down to dimensioning the thing in hard numbers. There are several things you'll undoubtedly use during this process: A tape measure in your workshop where you make the prototypes, some type of CAD package to produce the drawings, a reference tome like Human Dimensions and Interior Space to get your dimensions.

Those are all relatively modern tools. But people have been designing furniture for thousands of years; how did they do it not only without CAD and reference books, but without drafting tables and T-squares, and even without accurate measuring tools?

Jim Tolpin knows, and runs a design workshop called "By Hand & Eye" that is dedicated to providing the answer. 

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The lifelong woodworker and author of a dozen books on how to build things has researched the "pre-industrial artisan's approach to furniture design (as opposed to the typical and ubiquitous Industrial Arts approach)" and has found something interesting in the process: "The absence of mathematics."

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That's not entirely accurate: Perhaps the statement should be "The absence of hard mathematics." As Tolpin explains, "If you can count to 12 and divide it up into whole-number ratios, you pretty much have a handle on all the math you'll need to design anything from a cradle to a coffin to any furnishing in between." Furthermore, using the system described by Tolpin and co-author George R. Walker in their By Hand & Eye book, you'll never have to worry about losing a tape measure--because two of the measuring devices you'll most use are, barring an accident of birth or life, permanently attached to your body.

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Here's a video example of how this proportioning process works:

The other tool you'll need, besides your hand and foot, are a common pair of dividers. As the book description states,

Instead of serving up a list of formulas with magical names (i.e. the Golden Section, the Rule of Thirds) that will transform the mundane into perfection, George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin show how much of the world is governed by simple proportions, noting how ratios such as 1:2; 3:5 and 4:5 were ubiquitous in the designs of pre-industrial artisans. And the tool that helps us explore this world, then as now, are dividers.

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Tolpin teaches the $25, two-day course (Saturday and Sunday) at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking in Washington state. He and Walker's book, By Hand & Eye, can be purchased at Lost Art Press. (The hardcover is $43, a downloadable PDF version is $21.50, and both can be had for $53.75.)