World's Comfiest Mouse looks legitimately ugly... but it somehow works - Yanko Design

"I remember being in the third year of design college when I was introduced to this massive book titled "Indian Anthropometric Dimensions." For the uninitiated, this book contained practically all the dimensions of the average (and non-average) Indian person, male and female, old and young. The purpose of such a book was to understand ergonomics numerically, rather than visually. And for designers, this meant adding the ultimate constraint to our wild designs... so humans could actually use them."

"This YouTuber's take on an ergonomic mouse is the antithesis of everything I was taught. The problem is, however, it works! See, designers have to balance this ergonomic approach with actual aesthetics. That's why ergonomic mice actually look stylish, rather than being shaped exactly like the inverse of your hand. It's why gun grips look the way they do; why bike seats, or car seats have an abstract-ness to them, and don't actually have your individual buttocks molded into their designs."

"Play Conveyor's design process ignites a pretty strong debate between aesthetics and comfort. The Apple Magic Mouse, for example, is a prime example of the former completely ignoring the latter... and almost every mouse (even the ergonomic ones) aim at trying to achieve a balance between the two. Play Conveyor's experiment swings the pendulum the absolute opposite way - what if a mouse was hideous as sin, but legitimately comfortable?"

"The process starts fairly simply. Play Context first ripped apart a wired mouse to see what the inner components looked like. He then 3D printed a plastic chassis on which he added play dough, filling in all the negative space created by his hand. This basically turned the mouse into a direct inversion of his hand, creating something that quite literally fit like a glove. After the play dough model was made, he scanned it, refined it, and printed it."

Designers rely on anthropometric dimensions to quantify ergonomics and impose constraints that make products usable by humans. Ergonomic solutions often compromise aesthetics, so many devices seek a balance between comfort and visual appeal. A radical experiment inverted a hand by adding play dough to a 3D-printed mouse chassis, filling negative space to create a glove-like negative mold. The resulting shape was scanned, refined, and 3D printed to produce a mouse that prioritizes comfort over conventional appearance. The outcome demonstrates that extreme ergonomic fidelity can deliver superior comfort while provoking debate about the aesthetic cost of purely functional form.

Read at Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News