Cooper: Is The Mouse Dead?

"Do new touch-based systems herald the demise of the mouse? I think not."

The French term for wooden clogs – ‘sabots’ – is where the word ‘sabotage’ comes from. Angry workers would use their sabots to smash power looms in protest. In a similar vein, I’m just short of taking my Timberlands to our washing machine and dishwasher – indeed, any domestic appliance. I’m not angry about the devices robbing me of honest jobs like the laundry or washing up. Rather, I’d like to make a stand against machines that are too cumbersome to use.

To prove the point I’ve done a survey. Each and every machine in our kitchen uses the same sort of system for taking orders from its human master: a knob that clicks around a circular series of hieroglyphs and numbers. Yet each device does a radically different job. It makes no sense. My car and DVD player do totally different jobs and have different interfaces. Imagine if the people who designed dishwasher control mechanisms took over a car manufacturer. The world would be plunged into chaos. Click. Click. Click. Smash. When it comes to interfaces, one size definitely does not fit all.

All that said, I am keen to understand the workings of our new Kenwood food processor. It’s a mightily impressive-looking thing. It includes any number of nasty looking blades, and features a thick glass jug into which you drop the unfortunate foodstuff which is about to be euphemistically ‘processed’. Sure, it has the obligatory clicking interface, but I’m game to learn its ways.

My motivation? I want to take my computer’s mouse – the device’s brand name is withheld for legal reasons – and drop it into the blender. I’d then like to set the machine to its most vigorous and vicious setting and let the thing do its worst. Or best. Either way, I want to make mouse mousse. Using my boots to smash this particular mouse wouldn’t be justice enough. The mouse’s crime? Being so badly designed that it’s given me awful RSI. But maybe I’m being too hard on my mouse. I guess a designer’s lot is never an easy one. Design something like a mouse right and its fleshy user perceives the device as being perfectly natural, so it falls off their sensory radar. A good designer’s efforts are taken absolutely for granted.

It must be the same for chair makers. Sit in a good chair and you feel somehow weightless. The fact that some poor soul has laboured to make the chair so comfortable is, at that particular moment, utterly unimportant. Park yourself in a bad chair and you’ll be all too conscious of the chair’s howling presence and its inherent, moaning tortures. If you’re like me you’ll soon vow to find its maker and make him sit down. And what about the makers of those French sabots? They’d have to make shoes that felt natural to walk in and also didn’t hurt any protestors’ hands. That must have been quite a trick.

With all this in mind, I was fascinated to read the feature, ‘The Mouse’s Story’ in a recent issue. It explores the story of the humble mouse from its blocky beginnings to the smooth, scalloped devices that we use today. It also asks an important question: do new touch-based systems herald the demise of the mouse? Personally, I don’t think so. There’s something just right about using a good mouse. Indeed, a quick look around the PC Plus office confirms we’re all using much the same sort of design. So maybe mouse makers have pulled off the impossible and made an interface where one size really does fit all.