FOR reasons buried in my genetic past I was born with large hands and fingers. Today I wear a wedding ring of Z+ size and my hands are a valuable asset to any cricket team. But these great sausages for digits also cause me a deal of technology trouble. Many of our modern devices seem to have been designed with only the genteel and dainty in mind. On most pocket calculators, personal organisers, mobile phones, and remote controls I can hit three or four buttons at once. It feels as if the most basic of human dimensions are being overlooked by designers.

The mobile phone is becoming progressively smaller and shorter with the microphone gradually migrating away from the mouth toward the ear. Despite the claims of the manufacturers to the contrary, this is responsible for a progressive reduction in the acoustic performance of these devices. And I for one will not undergo plastic surgery to have my lips surgically moved to the middle of my cheek.

More recently all of this has been augmented by palmtop computers, pagers, cameras, and many other devices that display individual icons and characters so small that many people have to resort to a magnifying glass.

The reality is that just about every item of technology we commonly use and carry can be reduced to a single chip, or at most three, on a single printed circuit board. Screens, keyboards, and batteries dictate the ultimate dimensions. This is compounded by the pressure on manufacturing costs to use a minimum of raw material. Obviously this line of development cannot be sustained indefinitely: we must do something different.

One obvious solution is to coalesce several devices into one large unit, and thereby reduce the total number of buttons, knobs and screens, while realising sufficient surface area for a reasonable scale. The combined pager, mobile phone, personal assistant, and network computer can, initially at any rate, be a human scale device.

Perhaps a more attractive route would be to dissociate the interface from the device. A keyboard, key pad, mouse, screen, microphone, speaker unit that can drive or be driven by anything would be real boon. This would be especially so if terminals were available everywhere, and we could personalise and configure the unit to meet our specific needs. Moreover, for streets and public places, such a solution would drastically reduce the opportunities for vandals.

There is also at least one other comfort that such a technology would bring us, and that is, manipulative familiarity, or old shoe syndrome. Instead of finding ourselves pressured into committing unnatural acts of finger geometry every time we buy a new device, we could stick with our hard-won and long adopted routines.

As technology advances at an accelerating pace it is unreasonable of designers to ask the population to learn four or five new interfaces every year. Like the car, information technology will have to stabilise for commonly used devices and adopt some limiting conventions. And this should include useable buttons and displays.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk