Sci-Fi UI

Way back in the halcyon B*Witched-soundtracked days of 1998, I made a minuscule contribution to the art of of science fiction UI. I'd managed to score a few months of intern work at Revolution Software whilst they were developing their new game In Cold Blood (not, rather disappointingly, a point-and-click based on the work of Truman Capote), and was tasked with creating various incidental graphic elements and background details. 

This mostly involved traipsing around York with a clunky digital camera to take pictures of rusty boats and mouldy walls, then return to the studio to fiddle with them in Photoshop. I'd never used it before, but knew my way around Deluxe Paint on the Amiga (good lord, the 90s were a long time ago), so understood the basics. As with any Photoshop newb, I spent an inordinate amount of time getting excited about the filters menu. If I'd had my way, the entire game would've been plastic-wrapped.

I also had to make looping animations for all the little computer displays that appeared in the game. Nothing specific, just basic green text and rotating triangles that looked sufficiently science fictiony. In the final game, these might have only appeared a few pixels wide, but nonetheless I put lots of thought into how they should look.

And how should they look? Not like actual real-world computers with all their colours and boring logic, but like every display I'd seen on every spaceship on the big screen. I was replicating 70s and 80s science fiction: a copy of a copy of an idea of what computer displays are meant to look like in The Future. Basically, if I could picture Sigourney Weaver frowning at it, then it was a goer.

You see, if films have taught us anything, it's that the future will be made of green screens noisily updating text, one character at a time. And that zooming – sorry, *enhancing* – pictures will be accompanied by loud CLACK-CLACK-CLACK noises. HUDs will feature complex strings of numbers all over the place while random objects get highlighted and analysed. All interfaces will eventually be replaced by Virtual Reality headsets and involve more neon than you can shake a Lightcycle at.

Even relatively modern films insist that, in the future, we'll still be reading off green-screen displays. You watch The Matrix (whose design was clearly heavily influenced by my In Cold Blood work – you're welcome), and it's all incomprehensible scrolling columns of green symbols on black screens. The robot uprising appears to be a direct consequence of mankind's reliance on early Amstrad technology.

But sometimes a film comes along that gets the future of UI spot on. Rather than reproducing existing technology in the same old ways, it'll extrapolate contemporary technology and accurately anticipate entirely new devices – sometimes decades in advance. In the recent Apple/Samsung wars, one interesting design precedent was raised: a tablet computer with an uncannily similar form factor to the iPad can be seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And this was 1968. 

More recently, Minority Report marked a turning point in how interfaces are shown on the big screen. In preparation for the film, Spielberg gathered a futurist think tank – featuring architects, authors and scientists – to help him create a plausible 2054. With this throbbing brain-trust behind it, the film dropped that lazy old green text for something more forward-thinking, and took into consideration not just computer displays, but computer interaction. No keyboards or mice here: from the hand-jiving of Tom Cruise's iconic gesture-based display to smaller details like motion-sensitive cereal boxes, the film suggested the technology that would appear in the real world over the following years.

But as well as predicting, have these storytelling details, these props, actually informed the technology of today? In a way. There is an osmosis between fact and fiction – by permeating popular culture years in advance, the image of these devices being used on screen helps to sell an otherwise abstract idea to the public. Not that long ago ago, the idea of a pocket telephone would've seemed surreal and pointless, but we kind of understood the concept thanks to decades of bleeping blooping Star Trek communicators and Dick Tracy radio-watches. 

So what can we divine from our local fleapit about what's to come? If you can get past the alien gods and jolly green giants for a moment, take a look at the computer displays in The Avengers. Designed by Jayse Hansen – who, in recent years, has become something of a specialist in science fiction UI – they marry candy-coloured and data-heavy HUDs with an array of gestures and swipes on transparent screens. It's all very pretty, but it looks well thought-through too.

Another little-known film franchise might also have already shown us where we're headed, but we might have dismissed it for being too fantastical. Just when you think you've seen every possible reading of Star Wars imaginable, along comes something new to poke you in the brain.

Tor.com's Ryan Britt recently wrote a fascinating article on the apparent (and once it's been pointed out, obvious) illiteracy prevalent in the Star Wars universe. It would appear that intelligence has been delegated to devices. And why not? If your droid/app can do the mental heavy lifting – all the calculating, translating, navigating – why bother doing it yourself? And if voice-recognition is your primary UI, you'll never need to type anything again. Aside from the occasional "Uninstall Planet" icon on a big red button, the ability to read is pretty much redundant. 

The troubling side-effect of this complacent machine-dependence is that there don't appear to be any human-readable records. All knowledge and history is stuck inside the hidden library files of the machines, so an entire ruling class of space-wizards can be reduced to mythical status in the span of a single generation. The manner in which we communicate with our shiny gizmos dictates how we communicate with each other, and across generations. Perhaps the iPad knows who our real parents are and has the ability to fly, but it just hasn't bothered to tell us yet.

Maybe this is what we can expect from the increasingly science fictiony future. Or maybe it'll turn out that I hit the nail on the head in 1998, and one day computers will just be screens with rotating plastic-wrapped green triangles on them. We'll see.

Originally published in MacUser (Vol 28 No 23). Interesting aside: this entire piece was written on an iPhone in a hospital coffee shop. That's pretty sci-fi if you ask me.

Niggles

We live in the world of tomorrow (or Tomorrow’s World, as we called it yesterday). When I grew up, the best bit of technology I owned was a typewriter that came with black and red ink ribbons (just imagine the possibilities!), or perhaps Zoidzilla. If I were to go back now and explain to my pipsqueak younger self some of the things you can now do with an iPhone, little me would probably pop with excitement.

But then a troubled look would appear on my angelic little face.

“So it's a telephone that I can carry about and it plays songs and movies and games and it's also a camera and a book and a notebook and it connects to a sort of super-Ceefax and it feels like a lump of chiselled science fiction amazingness and it fits in my pocket and I can get it to do stuff just by talking at it?”

“Yes.”

“But you can't uninstall Stocks?”

“No.”

“STUPID.”

— The lab-coated boffins at Apple see the same idiosyncrasies as us, and they try to keep the niggle count low. From my regular column in the July 2013 issue of MacUser.

Literary Fiction

One of those concepts that didn't quite make the cut. Looking at this now, especially after having a bit of fun with Unknown Pleasures the other day, it occurs to me that I may be a bit obsessed with parallel lines. They keep popping up in my work. Odd.

I blame Blondie.

Orwell's Six Rules of Good Writing

Adrian Shaughnessy's rather splendid-looking collection of essays, Scratching the Surface, has just landed on my desk. Whilst having an initial flick-through, a brief editorial note caught my eye: Shaughnessy always strives to adhere to Goerge Orwell's six rules of good writing, originally published in his essay Politics and the English Language: 

1.
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
 
2.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
 
3.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
 
4.
Never use the passive where you can use the active. 
 
5.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
 
6.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.   

I was unfamiliar with these until now, but I rather like them in their common-sense simplicity – almost like the word version of Dieter Rams' ubiquitous ten principles for good design. Get rid of all the junk and get straight to the point. Only what is necessary. I like that.

I will try to adopt these rules for future pieces, although I fear they may expose me as being an adjective-happy verbose jargonifier (with a penchant for making up words). But Shaughnessy swears by them ("my writing is always poorer when I forget one or more of them"), so I reckon it's worth the risk.

See also: Vonnegut's seven tips for writing with style.

Known Pleasures

In the studio

Totems: Barbican bit, Eames House Bird and a Lego AT-AT.

Tools: Bamboo stylus and Fürst clutch pencils from Herb Lester Associates.

The desk in all its glory. Mac desktop from Kuvva.

Mmmm, Braun clock.

Books. So many books. You can't tell, but this selection are all colour co-ordinated. Yes, yes, I know.

My beloved Muji clipboard. Blatantly designed to complement the materials and curves of the iMac. As seen in the film Moon.

Spektr-R model from Papa Foxtrot.

Go on, tweet yourself

[Twitter] is the most fascinating search engine you could hope for. Rather than feeding a request into the great big Google Algorithmotron, asking actual human beings is so much more effective. Sometimes you ask a simple question and moments later you're inundated with generous pearls of wisdom and links and advice from all over the world, more than you could ever hope for. It's like having your own personal fleet of flying monkeys.
 
I took advantage of this when one of my more abstract works, Pouring Hot Fluids Over Apple Hardware, killed my close-bracket key. Whenever I needed to use it (more often than you'd imagine … in fact, here's one now), I just turned to the helpful distractible hordes of twitter. More often than not, there'd be someone already emoticon-grinning on there, so I could just copy and paste from that. If not, I just asked for a smile and I'd get a pile of nice little sideways happy robot faces looking at me within seconds.

— Twitter can be a distraction but it can often lead to new work, new relationships and, yes, useful hashtag punnery. From my regular column in the June 2013 issue of Creative Review. 

Bruno Munari on design as art

The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. Instead of pictures for the drawing room, electric gadgets for the kitchen. There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.

… It is therefore up to us designers to make known our working methods in clear and simple terms, the methods we think are the truest, the most up-to-date, the most likely to resolve our common aesthetic problems. Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beauty.

— Bruno Munari, Design as Art

The Great Gatsby

This week I've managed to read and watch The Great Gatsby. Suffice to say, one is significantly greater than the other.

I've had this Penguin Popular Classics edition sat on my shelf for a very long time, so three days before going to see the film seemed like good time to finally pick it up. I love these little things – cheap and simple and low-maintenance. You don't have to feel precious about the binding or the cover, you can just stuff it in your pocket and dip into it whenever, wherever. As much as I love a beautiful big hardback book, there's something liberating about reading something so basic – the printy equivalent of a simple text file. The design gets out of the way and just gives you the words. They are books purely for reading.

There's a great piece on the Independent about the peculiar challenge David Pearson was given when designing the series:

… a super-plain, type-only design featuring modern Gill Sans lettering, a doubled up logo featuring two dancing penguins (to denote, perhaps rather obliquely, the ‘popular’ aspect) and the £2 price tag, prominently, even proudly, displayed. The cover was an equally restrained maroon.

The office was, Pearson says, ecstatic about the design… until someone said, almost wistfully, that they preferred it to the ‘proper’ Penguin Classics. At which point everyone froze.

Why would anyone spend £6.99 on, say, Dracula, not to mention £14.99 for Coralie Bickford-Smith’s lovely cloth-covered hardback – both of which feature the full scholarly treatment of preface, chronology, introduction, further reading, a note on the text, plus 50 pages of appendices and notes, when the £2 version, containing just the novel, looks so good?

The Classics series is obviously where the money is to be made, and the reputation upheld, and that could not be put in jeopardy. Pearson was sent away with the brief – unique in his and probably many a designer’s career – to make the thing look worse.

Not wanting to mess with the type, or the layout, he decided on the colour, and after much deliberation settled on the lurid lime green that we have seen splashed across bookshops, a colour so uncommonly disgusting that none of the printer’s standard pigments came near it, and it had to be specially mixed.

Personally, I love the lurid green. And the way the Gill Sans "£2" forms an (accidental?) little heart symbol always catches my eye.

As for the film, the less said the better. It isn't terrible, it's just not very good. It's well cast, and is surprisingly faithful to the dialogue and structure of the book, but the whole thing is shot like a Harry Potter movie. Or rather, with all the unrestrained use of gimmicky 3D and swooping CGI, it looks like a two hour version of the Disney ident. 

Two reviewers hit the nail on the head: Tom Sutcliffe tweeted "imagine if Fitzgerald had written the novel with an exclamation mark at the end of EVERY sentence"; and William Fowler compared it to "what might happen if David LaChapelle and Busby Berkeley had got together to recreate a battle from Lord of the Rings".

In summary: read the book. Grab the cheapest edition you can find and read the heck out of it, old sport.

Friday Links

• Just when you think there aren't any more possible readings of Star Wars, along comes Ryan Britt to postulate that everyone in Star Wars is illiterate. Fascinating and well reasoned article, says a lot about where we're going.
• And this seems a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: vintage pics of NASA facilities. I bet Ken Adam studied these pics for days.  
• Mid-century souvenir postcard envelopes from various Japanese vacation destinations. Nice.
• What's YOUR favourite magazine? magCulture wants to know, and it's for a bloody good cause. 
• The Coppola family tree. There are a LOT of them.
• Spotted this at the end of Star Trek Into Darkness' credits: "No Animals Were Harmed" is a registered trademark! And the American Humane Association aren't too shy to threaten legal action if you misuse it.
• Dear Apple, let's talk about photos. Been using iPhoto a lot recently (having a baby will do that to you), and it really is a sluggish, out-of-date pile of arse. Desperately needs a massive update.
• The always intelligentfunny XKCD on why sensible passwords are sensible.
• 14 year-old discovers iPad Smart Cover magnets can shut off implanted defibrillators.
• Actual amazeballs: the Eyeball, packed with cameras and sensors, can be thrown into a room/cave/wherever. It instantly creates a digital panorama (complete with environmental warning) for rescue workers or explorers to map out a space. Like something from Minority Report.
• Want to get Tom Hanks to appear on your show? Send him a typewriter.