The first time I had a proper look at a mouse trap was in 1988 as I moseyed through the displays at Remo, the short-lived but widely revered general store on the corner of Oxford and Crown streets in Darlinghurst, Sydney.

Of course, I’d seen mouse traps all my young life, growing up in a weatherboard bungalow on Melbourne’s Frankston line. But standing there, with the little contraption – essentially a slender timber rectangle surmounted by a tightly wound spring mechanism – I had an epiphany: I finally saw it for what it was, as the product of a designer’s mind.