Ergonomics

Originally posted October 24, 2016

 Look at these fucking buttons:

I have to hit these buttons many times per day, always with the same overworked left thumb. They are terrible buttons and I have a mild repetitive strain injury as a result.

I don't understand. This steering wheel is in a 2013 vehicle, but the problem of "making buttons that are nice to press, even thousands of times a day every day" was solved by video game manufacturers in the late 1970s. Do engineers who make vehicles think about ergonomics at all? Does anyone other than video game console manufacturers??

Look at this beautiful goddamn artifact:

 

Look at it. It actually looks like it was made by people who have hands, for people who have hands. Even my unusually large and hammy doom-fists can comfortably hold this, and play with it, for hours. The Nintendo Gamecube controller is the finest nonliving thing I have ever held. How I miss it.

I don't know anything about ergonomics in practice, but it's like architecture in how prevalent it is, affecting humans always and everywhere. The only book I've even heard of about it is The Design of Everyday Things, which popularized the useful concept of affordance. Hopefully I can at least listen to the audiobook some day.

I play video games on my prematurely aging laptop with a Logitech F310. It's no Gamecube controller, but I can still use it for any amount of time without any pain whatsoever. You could literally rip off a piece of the steering wheel and put the controller in, Megas XLR-style, and create a much nicer experience. If I had a lot more experience at DIY engineering, and I owned the truck I drive, I might just have tried something like that. Because it would be cool.

Well, bye