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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">Eames DemetriosHow long does it take to count to a million?

Two hours? Two weeks? Does it matter anyway?

According to author-filmmaker Eames Demetrios, it does. A lot.

“My theory is that scale is the new geography. If you know the map of the world and you hear about something happening in Brazil, you have in your mind that ‘we are here and Brazil is there.’ But if you don’t have a map, there is your house in Jakarta and everywhere else,” he told The Jakarta Post during a recent visit to Indonesia.

The answer, by the way, is seven days. And if one multiplies that by 10, one will get a rough picture of the scale of the traffic problem in Jakarta, which houses some 10 million people all making their choices about mobility.

“If you counted every person in Jakarta it would take 70 days. If that’s not intuitive to you then how can you grasp the challenge. I see thousands of cars on my way but the problem is the 10 million cars I don’t see,” Demetrios said.

There are various factors limiting a human’s understanding of the matter. Not everyone can be bothered to count to a million or see how small an atom is, thus the limited intuitive ability of humans to comprehend scale.

However, there are some ways to transcend the limitations and one couple made a notable contribution through the 1977 classic short movie Powers of Ten, which simply features the scene of a lakeside picnic being zoomed out up to the point of the viewer seeing the galaxy as a mere speck of light and zoomed in until the viewer can see inside the DNA of the person picnicking, all the way announcing the scale of the view such as 105, 10 -10 and so on.

The couple who made the movie was famed American designers and moviemakers Charles and Ray Eames, the grandparents of Demetrios.

As the director of the Eames Office, one of his tasks is to champion the works of the late couple, including educating people about scale, because, according to him, the things we can’t see or comprehend well are there. “Whether we see them or not, they affect us. If we can’t even engage them or think about them then we can’t be good citizens of the world.”

Those who are less familiar with Powers of Ten might recognize the works of the Eames couple through their furniture design, such as the Eames molded plywood chair, designed in the 1940s and voted the Best Design of the 20th Century by TIME.

Demetrios, along with the other members of his family involved in the Eames Office, has made it his mission to make sure that the quality of furniture products is maintained overtime.

Although most of his family members work in design or the creative field, they have agreed to separate their own works from that of Charles and Ray. Most of the Eames Office’s new works revolve around things such as software, exhibitions and education, which of course include spreading the Powers of Ten knowledge.

Demetrios said that this is usually done through the teaching of teachers and going directly to groups of students as well and having them do projects, such as making their own scales of the universe.

But he has other projects besides those involving the Eames Office. In fact, he has a whole world of a project currently going on under the name of the Kcymaerxthaere.

The tongue twister is an ongoing fiction about a parallel universe with the pages scattered all over the world, including in New York, Dubai, various parts of Australia and Wynberg, South Africa, in the form of bronze plaques.

One of the plaques is supposedly located underwater near Garvallach Islands in Scotland.

According to Demetrios, one may choose to travel all over the world — referred to as the “linear” world as opposed to the universe of Kcymaerxthaere — to read the stories, which are at times interconnected. Yet, the stories are also available on the Kcymaerxthaere website.

“The interesting thing is when you see one of them, it changes how you experience this because you can read the stories online and you see the pictures but now you know it really is there,” he said.

Demetrios’ used his chance to visit Indonesia on the occasion of the Essential Eames Exhibition, which features the stories and works of the Eames couple, to explore the possibility of installing one of the plaques in the country.

Preserving a legacy and traveling the world to install plaques might be the tasks occupying most of his time now, but Demetrios is also known as a filmmaker. His choice to devour 500 movies during his high school days became evidence of his love of the screen and his studies in Harvard were in fact about biology and film.

However, he said he was “thrown out” of both departments, with one cause being his making a movie about ferns that might have been too humorous for some people’s tastes.

Nevertheless, Demetrios graduated under the term “general studies” and proceeded to make a number of movies, including those related to the Eames legacy. He said, however, that somehow movies are currently not his primary choice of creative channeling.

Demetrios recalled numerous moments in which he was witness to his grandparents’ creativity and absorbed them through everyday life, such as visits to their famed house, Case Study #8, which is considered by many as an architectural icon, and chatting with his grandfather Charles about movies.

Although, as with most children, he didn’t think there was anything especially unique about his grandparents then, he recalled considering them as “cool” and doing “interesting” things.

With a universe to maintain and hundreds of places to still visit, “interesting” might indeed run in the family.