Jim Yurchenco and Rickson Sun joined IDEO (or Hovey-Kelley, as it was called in its early years) not long after its founding. Like the company's founders and many other early employees (and indeed, many of the designers who worked for Apple in its early years), they graduated from Stanford: Sun studied with David Kelley in the Product Design Program, while Yurchenco received an MFA. Both worked on the Apple mouse project with Jim Sachs, Douglas Dayton, Dean Hovey, and David Kelley: Sun contributed to the electrical design, while Yurchenco was responsible for the design of the interior structure that held the ball, optical sensors, and electronics-- what later came to be called the "ribcage."
The interview was conducted on 26 April 2000 in a conference room in IDEO's main office in Palo Alto. The interview was transcribed and edited by Alex Pang.
The original tape has too much background noise to be published online as an audio file. The recording (an Audio Interchange Format file) has been deposited with Stanford Special Collections.
The transcript has been broken up into several pages, each of which deals with a particular subject. When discussion of an issue occurs in two or three pages, or a device or institution gets substantive mention more than once, hyperlinks are provided between those different sections. A full transcript is also available that contains the same content, but presents it on a single page.