Ergonomic Mouse Design and The Homunculus

Meet the homunculus, an imaginary creature with a weird name and a weirder face.

Pretty fetching, eh? We don’t think so either. But our friend the homunculus, the fellow who’s all lips and hands, has something important to teach us about ergonomic mouse design.

A homunculus is a scale representation of human physiology. The outsized parts have greater significance in whatever aspect is being analyzed. The example above is a motor homunculus, drawn to demonstrate the division of the brain’s motor cortex. The more bandwidth is devoted to a particular body part in the motor cortex, the more potential dexterity […]