Rob Walker Takes Closer Look at Tiny People in Architectural Renderings

Who are those pedestrians forever wandering around, loitering about, or striding purposefully through shimmering architectural renderings? They tend to be non-descript, culturally diverse, and more likely than the general population to favor red shirts. Rob Walker, fresh off his appearance on the season opener of Design Matters, investigated these digital sprinklings of humanity in his most recent “Consumed” column in The New York Times Magazine. “The apparent purpose of these figures is to provide sense of scale—in fact one architect friend of mine refers to these figures as ‘scalies,'” writes Walker of the rendering hordes known also as “people textures” and “populating images.”