Jim Yurchenco was responsible for squeezing the guts inside the impossibly slim Palm V. He helped build the mouse for the Apple Lisa, which was significant in that it was the first mouse ever used by regular people. He was the first full-time employee at the company that would become Ideo, the massively influential design firm. But before all that, he was a sculptor.

It was the mid-1970s and Yurchenco had just started an MFA program at Stanford University. Soon after arriving on campus, he got a key to the design school's student workshop, and in subsequent years spent little time anywhere else. Though he was primarily a welder, he picked up all sorts of new tools and techniques as his works grew more ambitious, learning from the other students who were working alongside him.

That became the template for his entire career: hanging out in shops, soaking up expertise, figuring out new ways to build things. If you do that long enough, you end up being quite good at it, and by the end of his time at Ideo, Yurchenco was not only devising new products but entirely new tools to make them possible.

Last week, when I talked to Yurchenco on the day of his retirement, he very much looked the part of sage über-maker, with white wispy hair pulled back in a ponytail. We were surrounded by larger-than-life blow-ups of some of his 80 patents, each as tall as a basketball hoop, set on foam board and propped against the walls. These are the type of decorations you make when you throw a retirement party for a celebrated design engineer.

But no one starts out as a master builder. In the early days, Yurchenco and his fellow designers were very much winging it, learning the design business as they went along. "If we knew a day more than our clients did, we were golden," he says.

Even when that client was Steve Jobs.

Building the Apple Mouse

Yurchenco was just a year or two out of school when he got a call from an old Stanford pal, David Kelley. Kelley had just started a new design firm and asked if Yurchenco might want to join as an engineer. That meant a proper salary—Yurchenco had been working at a medical tech start-up, being paid mostly in stock—so he agreed. The company was called Hovey-Kelley; Ideo was still a few years off at that point. But thanks to co-founder Dean Hovey's relationship with Jobs, Apple became one of the young company's first clients.

Apple was working on the Lisa. As the familiar yarn goes, Jobs had toured Xerox PARC in Palo Alto and seen the future in the lab's graphical user interface and the mouse that drove it. Apple's engineers were taking care of the GUI, which left Hovey-Kelley with the mouse.

Jim Yurchenco back in the day. IDEO

The version Xerox had been using was an expensive, delicate prototype. Yurchenco and company got their hands on one and promptly dismantled it. "It was obviously way too complicated for what Jobs needed, which was a really low cost, easily manufacturable, reproducible product for consumers," Yurchenco recalls. The Xerox mouse, full of fussy little parts, reportedly cost $400 to make. It was Yurchenco's job to transform it into something that could be made on the cheap, by the tens of thousands.

His colleagues tackled the industrial design while Yurchenco turned his attention to the inner workings. The Xerox mouse relied on a small ball, forced down against the tabletop, whose motion was tracked by an elaborate system of mechanical switches. Yurchenco started looking at other input devices to see how it could all be done more elegantly. He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job.

The Atari machine differed from the Xerox mouse in a few key ways. For one, its trackball wasn't forced up or down. Instead, it just floated. Yurchenco tried doing the same and found the mouse functioned just fine if you let gravity do the work. Moreover, it resulted in less friction and fewer parts. That was one key insight. The Atari machine also used optics to track the trackball's movement, relying on interrupted beams of light instead of mechanical switches. By borrowing this concept, Yurchenco further streamlined the internal components. That was insight number two.

The Apple mouse. IDEO

The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver a good experience. "Suddenly we realized, you don't care if it's accurate!" he recalls. People don't pay attention to what their hand is doing when they use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes. "It's like driving a car. You don't look at where you're turning the steering wheel, you turn the steering wheel until the car goes where you want." Less stringent demands on the accuracy front further let the team shave away parts and costs.

The mouse was a great success. Apple used the exact same internal components in a different housing for the Macintosh mouse a few years later. "It was a couple of very simple insights, when you get down to it, that drove how the thing would behave," Yurchenco says. "And that determined how you'd design it."

The basic approach—pairing a freely-rolling ball with a optoelectronic system—was used by generations of mice that followed, changing only incrementally until optical mice did away with trackballs altogether. "They had a pretty good run," Yurchenco says. "There were probably billions of those suckers made."

Becoming a Master of Making

The design process for the Apple mouse embodied a few things that continue to define Ideo. For one, it was very much a hands-on affair. "We were always making stuff," Yurchenco remembers. "Prototyping as fast, as dirty, as rapidly as possible." Ideo predates CAD, 3-D printing, and CNC, at least insofar as any of those technologies were cheap enough for a fledgling design studio to afford

Yurchenco worked primarily with pencil and paper, and for years his most sophisticated tool was an HP calculator. Today's powerful workflows, which let you build a fully-realized product in a piece of software and then command machines to materialize it in the same room, simply didn't exist back then. You just had to build stuff yourself, piece by piece.

The workshop at Ideo. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

The skills Yurchenco picked up in the Stanford workshop were useful in this part of the process. But the prototypes didn't always demand elaborate production. Occasionally the designers made polished presentation models, but more often they were crude creations. Then just as now, a prototype made out of foam core and a few rubber bands could be invaluable for sharpening an idea. One of the first prototypes of what would become the Apple mouse was just the ball from a roll-on deodorant stick and a butter dish from a Walgreens in Palo Alto. "All it had to do was illustrate a principle," Yurchenco says.

But the workshop is only where products are born. Ultimately, they're fashioned in factories. And while Yurchenco was familiar with the world of the workshop, one of the great challenges of his early years at Ideo was getting familiar with the world of mass reproducibility.

"At that point, we didn't have a very intimate knowledge of all that," he says. "We do now! But we were learning as we went. I was looking at textbooks and talking to people who had built tools and molded parts. As I went along, I was incorporating this stuff into the design. But there was a very steep learning curve in the first couple of years."

In the early going, it was about bending the product to the process. You figured out what injection molding can do, and then you designed a product within parameters. Eventually, Yurchenco became adept at bending those processes to his will. Until the Palm V, all Palm Pilots were made of plastic pieces that screwed together. When the company came to Ideo with an audacious idea for its new device—putting the same functionality as the existing model in a remarkably sleek package—Yurchenco had to figure out how it might all come together.

Ultimately, he came up with a clever mechanical architecture. He put the device's guts on a plastic frame and bonded the stamped aluminum front and back panels with a hot-melt adhesive. The design made room for the Palm V's clever built-in stylus holder and allowed the device to be re-heated and pulled apart when it needed servicing.

A series of Palm V prototypes. IDEO

"That was a really important product for us, and the industry, Yurchenco says. "It was one of the first cases where the physical design—the feel and touch points—were considered to be as important as the performance." That wasn't lost on users; the device sold like wild and helped shape modern gadget-lust. Ars Technica's review of the device came with a disclaimer: "Remember, if you don't intend to buy a Palm V, under no circumstances should you allow yourself to look/touch/hold/feel/smell/see/inspect/rub/behold/taste or have any type of contact with one."

It was one example where Yurchenco pushed some processes to arrive at a predetermined form. But in some cases, he's invented them outright. One of Yurchenco's patents is for a tool he came up with during the design process for a Western Digital Passport hard drive. Western Digital engineers had said Ideo's proposed design—which included an injection-molded case undercut all the way around—was impossible to manufacture. By creating a tool that splayed the enclosure open slightly after it was molded, Yurchenco made it work, and he still admires the results today. "It's a drive, just like any other. It holds data. But it's such a sensual, perfectly-done thing," he says.

The Secret: Keep Asking the Same Questions

Yurchenco has had a ground-level view of the design industry from the start of the personal computer revolution. So what's changed?

For one, he says, concerns like usability have become a major part of the design process from the beginning. That involves questions like: How do people react to a product? And how might they abuse it? What will they do wrong, and how can the product help prevent them from doing that? "If our design is allowing them to do something wrong, it's not their fault. It's our fault," he says.

But as Yurchenco sees it, today's young designers also are different. As talented as they may be, they may not be as in touch with the realities of manufacturing as Yurchenco and his peers were early in their careers. "The younger engineers are a little bit naive in many cases about what it actually takes to make something," he says. In the era of rapid prototyping, where you can make anything on-demand, it's easy to forget products still are made in factories overseas.

I ask Yurchenco what his advice would be to this upcoming generation of designers. He answers without hesitation: Ask a bunch of people the exact same question. Why? Because you'll get a bunch of different answers.

"When I was first learning about injection molding, I'd go hang around a tooling shop and ask questions," he says. "And they'd have some language to describe what they were doing, and they'd tell me how they were doing it. And I'd go into another shop, and there'd be a little twist on it. They'd have a different language and a different way of doing it. And I'd go into a third shop, and it was the same thing. They're all ending up with the same result in the end, which is an injection mold. But they're getting there in different ways. And by constantly asking the same questions over and over again, I learned a heck of a lot about injection molding, to the point where I know a lot more than most of these toolers do. 'Cause I've been to 300 shops and seen 300 ways of doing it. And the more you know how to make things, the better designer you're going to be."