Measuring the body, measuring through the body

Body is a particular relevant way to tackle design processes, because of the multiplicity of status it can acquire during these processes: a source of information, a target to fit, a device to perform, a complex technology, an apparatus for the users. A specific body is presented in this paper: the measured body. Trough racial anthropology, sport performances, demographic statistics, medical treatments, psycho-cognitive surveys, quantified self, or in many other contexts, human body is subject to a wide range of various measures. I would on my own propose some thoughts grounded on field exploration, concerning sensory analysis practices, in various laboratories.
According to the symmetrical glaze STS have gave from the beginning to both human and non-humans, objects and subjects, the body is for a start itself one of the “stuffs” overlapping categories, blurring distinctions between things and persons, at the same a time a given and an object to perform. The measures of the body, and made with/through the body, highlight how it could be enacted, revealed, understood, improved by technology, especially when it requires some quantitative data. But it allows us also to grasp how the body is viewed simultaneously as a technological device and as the data origin, to intervene during complex practices (e.g. standardization, lab experiments, and marketing surveys).
One of the numerous outcomes of such research could be the role of these bodily measurements in the definition of the actors, as well individuals than collectives. By the way it takes on a share on the network tying body to numerical data and to materiality-other-than-human, to measure the body/ through the body seems to afford socio-materiality in a particularly productive manner. Many scholars have inquired about numbers, how they could bring objectivity, how they produce confidence and security, and how finally they participate to black-box the measures themselves. Here, the aim is to understand the specificity of the body as measurement issue, being the interface of the-objects-to-be-measured and the instrument-of-measure.