Imaginary Worlds - Future Screens Are Mostly Blue

Episode Date: August 24, 2017

This week, I'm playing one of my favorite episodes of the podcast 99% Invisible where host Roman Mars and producer Sam Greenspan look at control panels in science fiction -- the clunky, the elegant, and the just plain baffling. But those user interfaces have one thing in common: they're mostly blue. Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff also discuss the real-world lessons that designers should take from science fiction, and they come up with an intriguing theory as to why some of the most risible sci-fi user interfaces may not be so absurd. http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/future-screens-are-mostly-blue/Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body.

Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle.

We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. So this summer I have been binging on a show called The Expanse on the SyFy network. It's based on a series of novels by James S.A. Corey.

And the series is set in the far future where humans have colonized the moon and Mars and the asteroid belt, which is full of all these incredible raw materials. But that's led to this massive intergalactic political infighting in the galaxies on the brink of war all the time. Late last night, our routine surveillance of diplomatic corps logged an urgent communique between Ambassador de Graaf and his counterpart on Mars. Now, one of the things I always love noticing in a show like this are the computer interfaces. And it's like a part of my brain in a show like this are the computer interfaces. And it's like a part of my brain knows the show is obviously made now on Earth.

But then there's this other part of my brain that actually believes I'm seeing a glimpse into the future. And so I'm curious to see what these computer interfaces will look like. For example, everybody is walking around with these sort of transparent phones that look like they're made of plastic. You know that memory crypt that we took out of that stiff? Yeah. All right. Go through the... It had an unregistered flight path. By the same time, I'm thinking, wait a second, that technology is more like 20 years away, not 200 years away. So tech in sci-fi, particularly control panels and computer interfaces,

is something that I've wanted to cover for a long time. There's only one problem. My friend Sam Greenspan already did that story for the podcast 99% Invisible, hosted by Roman Mars. And I have never been able to think of a better way into that subject than what Sam and Roman did. So with their permission, I am going to play that episode today. It's called Future Screens Are Mostly Blue. And one of the things I really like about this episode is that they deal with this

problem that our ideas about the future become dated very quickly, but they take that problem and they give it a really surprising twist. That is just after the break. All right, so this is Roman Mars and Sam Greenspan and every truffleman, the rest of the 99% Invisible crew talking about control panels. Or as Captain Picard would say right now, Computer, play, future screens are mostly blue. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Welcome to the Make It So Index of Interaction Design.

Friends, our producer Sam Greenspan has seen the color of the future. I have seen it. You have seen it. We all know that the color of the future is blue. Lesson 1. Fut screens are mostly blue. When science fiction becomes science fact, the team colors have already been chosen. Pretty much science fiction is blue. 1968, denim blue. 1976, Egyptian blue.

1979, ultramarine. 1980, powder blue. Blue, it is inhuman, future-looking, kind of mystical. That's Chris Nossel, sci-fi aficionado. There's not a lot of blue in nature, right? There's not a lot of blue food. So I think there is something fundamentally inhuman about that color. Or unnatural.

Yeah, and that really fits the technologies of the future world. As contrast. Yeah. The other guy is Nathan Shedroff. Also into sci-fi. And like many sci-fi guys, their love of the art form takes on an obsessive quality. And here's the thing. Chris and Nathan are also designers.

Chris is with a firm called Cooper, and Nathan is on faculty at the California College of the Arts, both in San Francisco. Sci-fi obsession met design obsession, and the resulting glorious nerd fest was a book. Were the authors of the book Make It So interaction design lessons from science fiction? Make It So is a comprehensive compendium of real-world lessons that designers can and should and do take from science fiction. So to give you an idea of how exhaustive their line of inquiry is, that lesson about future screens being mostly blue? Lesson one, future screens are mostly blue. Nathan and Chris actually figured this out empirically.

They built a database of more than 10,000 images from sci-fi movies. 1982, royal blue. 1983, Prussian blue. 1986, mariner blue. 1990, periwinkle. Then I went through and I sort of cropped out the key screens of interfaces, stuck them into Photoshop for a given year, shrunk them down to a single pixel, and then pumped the saturation. 1996, Iris Blue. 1997, Aquamarine. 1999, Baby Blue.

2000, Midnight Blue. 2002, Aquamarine, again. And from that, they could determine the average color of all interfaces from every sci-fi movie that came out in a given year. And when you lay those average colors next to each other, you can see. 1968 to 2011, pretty much science fiction is blue. There are some exceptions. 1973, Umber Brown. 1977, Tangerine. 1991. For 1991, Scarlet Red. The very red Terminator 2. But for the most part, if you just blur your eyes and glance at it, you can see that it's

always blue. 2003, Dark Cerulean. 2004, Slightly Darker Baby Blue. 2005, mint green. 2008, again with the aquamarine, slightly darker this time. 2009, pretty close to that baby blue from 2004. 2010, navy blue. Of course, the point here is not to forecast what technology will actually look like. Screens of the future may or may not actually be blue. But sci-fi is about letting our imaginations run wild and create imagined worlds. And someone has to design the experience of characters moving through that imagined world. And even if your sci-fi world is a thousand years in the future, those choices are in constant dialogue with the present. When Chris and Nathan started this project,

they went back to the very first sci-fi film, Les Voyages dans la Lune, A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. It was actually one of the first films, period. It premiered in 1902. And the thing that I noticed when I saw that movie was, wait a minute, where the hell are the interfaces? Because there aren't any. In this future as seen from 1902, you send people to the moon by putting them inside a giant

canister, loading that canister into an enormous cannon. You light a wick and then bang, that's how you get to the moon. The audience and even the filmmakers still had an industrial age paradigm. In their lives, they only ever encountered levers and buttons, maybe. Technology and electricity were kind of a strange and off-putting things. The 1902 audience did not require any type of UI for a lunar spacecraft, which tells you something about living in 1902. But Chris and Nathan say sci-fi doesn't just reflect reality. Reality sometimes reflects sci-fi. That when components of science fiction saturate the public imagination,

it can affect how we design things. Case in point, one of Motorola's first cell phones, the Microtac. And it was not a particularly successful phone. Now, the Microtac was And it was not a particularly successful phone. Now, the Microtac was a flip phone that opened downward. You held the device in your hand and the mouthpiece flipped down so you could talk into it. And the Microtac wasn't selling. So the Motorola engineers in Illinois took it down the road to the Argonne National Laboratory. And the Argonne engineers immediately said, oh, you made it wrong. And the Motorola folks were like, what do you mean? No one's

ever made one of these. How do you know it's wrong? You know, like on it wrong. And the Motorola folks were like, what do you mean? No one's ever made one of these. How do you know it's wrong? You know, like on Star Trek. And they said it has to open up like this. The Argon engineers just expected the phone to open upwards, like Captain Kirk's communicator. Downwards just felt weird. And they went back and made it open the right way.

And then the next generation? Well, that phone went gangbusters. And it was called the StarTAC. Motorola accidentally happened into a system where their customers had been trained for 30 years of reruns on the right way to do mobile communication.

There's actually a whole host of design lessons to take from Star Trek. Lesson two, establish a comprehensive visual syntax. Star Trek. Lesson two, establish a comprehensive visual syntax. Star Trek The Next Generation excelled at creating a holistic visual syntax, and it was probably thanks to extreme budget constraints. They didn't have the production budget to just wire tons of surfaces with dummy buttons and have them lit individually so that they could control them. And as a cost-saving move, they sort of developed this idea of, well, we can just print out

film and backlight it under surfaces, and that can serve as the sort of wow factor of, man, there's a lot of controls for this. It must be a starship. Working. Ready. If you've seen one episode, you know what this looks like. A flat screen with a black backdrop and a bunch of brightly colored buttons underneath a glass exterior. They're everywhere on the ship.

The bridge, the sickbay, engineering. They're on the tablet computers. Essentially all of the controls show up that way. They all have this uniformity about them that not only looks cool, but also tells you from a very quick glance that it's related to Star Trek. They even gave the interface a name, LCARS. Accessing library computer data. This computer terminal provides full access to the LCARS computer net.

It can be operated both by voice and keypad commands. I do have the definition for those curious. It stands for Library Computer Access Slash Retrieval System. There you go. LCARS was the archetype of the image under glass paradigm that governs our virtual lives. And people really latched onto it. To this day, there are still people modding their computers and tablet devices to make them look like an LCARS device from the 24th century by way of the late 1980s and early 90s. But here is the really brilliant thing about Star Trek.

Every single species has their own equivalent of Elkhars. So the Klingon race, for instance, it's all red triangles. The Bajorans have this sort of bluish purple oval thing. And the Borg have an array of green circles and green lighting everywhere. It's a semiotic lesson for storytelling, right? Green equals Borg. And wherever green creeps, you know the Borg are. That's sort of essentially a visual macro for an entire class of stories. It's their own brand and they're really good brand managers. Yeah, they have good

brand managers. But Chris and Nathan are quick to point out that not everything we see in sci-fi is necessarily good or even feasible. From the minute we started our interview, they could not wait to go off on how much of a waste of time they think gestural interfaces are. Think minority report. When you move your arms in space, that's called cardio. That's aerobic exercise, and it's tiring. Lesson three, avoid gestural interfaces. Supposedly, Tom Cruise had to keep taking breaks on the set because these things tired him out.

That future looked exhausting. Even if conducting your computer like an orchestra turns out to be a dead end, that bad interface of that imagined future can help you think about actual user interfaces of the present. And that's how we can get into apologetics. Lesson 4, employ apologetics wherever possible. Apologetics is a term borrowed from religion primarily. It's the practice of coming up with rational explanations to reconcile the apparent contradictions inside of a faith. Basically making sense of the plot holes that surface when various religious stories are

stacked on top of each other. This can become applicable to sci-fi. If you just assume, for the sake of argument, that everything in sci-fi is there for a reason, you can find some really interesting lessons in design. So let's consider Star Wars, namely that part when Luke and Han Solo are in the Millennium Falcon blowing up TIE fighters. Ha ha! Got him! Falcon blowing up TIE fighters. Now, if we were really in space watching these ships blow up, we wouldn't hear anything. I mean, it only takes that moment where you have to describe it and you realize, wait a minute,

they're fighting in the vacuum of space. Where exactly is the sound propagating? Because sound is how our brain interprets the vibration of air molecules. Of which there aren't any in space. So why do we hear these ships exploding in the film? The easy answer would be, oh, that's just Lucas trying to make something that feels right to people who were used to World War II film footage. But in fact, if you imagine that scene without the audio, it's a lot more miserable of a task to know where in 3D space are these TIE fighters around me? How would I find them? Sure, you could give me a screen, but that requires me that I take my eyes off of the action. You could give me a heads up display, which might work, but audio is 360 degrees, much

more than my, what is it, 120 degrees of vision. So that if that audio wasn't there, then you would expect somebody to put sensors on the outside of the Millennium Falcon and provide 3D sound inside the gunner ship that would put that audio there. So the sound is an interface. The sound is the main part of the interface there, right? Yes, Luke can look at this TIE fighter, but he's also aware that coming over his right shoulder is another one that as soon as this one explodes, he's got to turn his gun and

take care of. That's vital to that interface of working. And you can only get there by trying to reconceive why does that thing that seems broken would really work. Okay, so here's another one. 2001, A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick. So in 2001, Dr. Floyd is on a satellite and making a video call to his daughter back on Earth. Yes?

Hello. Hello. How are you, Squirt? All right. What are you doing? Playing. Where's Mommy? And then you see his daughter start button mashing the controls on the video phone. But strangely, you don't hear any of the buttons. Now, you can think, hey, that's wrong. What, was the sound designer sleeping on the job?

But with our apologetics hat on. But in fact, that's the way it ought to work. If you had a system that was context aware, and that would include awareness of the identity of its user, it would say, hmm, I've looked at this conversation. No one has asked this little girl to push a button. She's a little girl of about five or six years old, and it's indiscriminate mashing. I can safely disregard this as input. It's not a crisis. It's not a crisis.

It's not a selection of any sort. So if you were designing a system that was truly context aware, that's exactly the way you would build it. And anyone who's had to have a telephone call with a kid would know this is actually the way it should be built. And so the inputs to the interface are just not getting relayed. The interface is actively interpreting them. Lesson five, relayed, the interface is actively interpreting them. Lesson 5. Interfaces should not just interpret, but also report. That's only broken if you presume that the interface is a dumb capturing device, like a television camera. If instead you reconceive of it as sort of a real-time scanner, interpreter, and presenter, you've got an opportunity there to actually interpret the information.

Let's do one more. This one's kind of tricky, but stick with it. Lesson six, find the human factor in technological shortcomings. For this lesson, we go to a movie called Logan's Run, where there's this interface called the circuit, which people of this post-apocalyptic world used to find. Sex partners. It's Craigslist. It's even weirder than Craigslist. It is a lot weirder. post-apocalyptic world used to find sex partners. It's Craigslist.

It's even weirder than Craigslist. It is a lot weirder. I'm just saying something. So Logan is hanging out in his apartment of the future and he turns on this thing called the circuit, which basically lets him tune in different people who are ostensibly available for coupling.

Anyway, the thing about the circuit is that it's a really clumsy piece of technology. We can see that it takes kind of a long time to tune someone in, and then it's up to Logan to decide a quick yes or no as to whether he wants to pull that person into his apartment or send them back out into the ether. As an interface, it's unbelievably bad. For lots of reasons. Like the male gaze problem alone in this case is just morally reprehensible.

But if you can get past that for a second, just notice that the circuit only lets you tune in one person at a time. And you have to give a quick yes-no answer as to whether you want that person coming into your apartment. If he's going along and he sort of says, oh, number one's not good, number two's not good, number three's not good, number four's not, okay. Well, maybe, was it two or one that was better? Well, maybe I can go back, but you don't see a mechanism to go back. And to make things worse, there seems to be no ability to adjust the settings of what or who you might want.

Like the first person that Logan tunes in is a guy, and you can see right away that our hero does not want to pull him or any other dude into his apartment. Pardon my gender or sexuality binary here, but one of the most fundamental things you would name is what's the gender of my possible partners. And he didn't have a single preference setting on this interface, so it just seems horrible. But there is evidence that this design has some merit, if you can think of an apologetic for it. Listen. I used to play this game with friends of mine called the 11th Man Game. And the 11th Man Game, or the 11th Woman Game, depending on who you're playing it with, works as follows. When you're sitting in a public place,

you pick a doorway and you challenge that friend and you say, OK, I want you to pick one of the next 10 people to walk through that doorway to date or if you have that sort of friendship, have sex with. And or you will be forced to do that same thing with the 11th person. OK, so you're with me. You see person one. Yes or no. You say no. You get person two. Yes or no. Say no. You get person three. You can't go back and pick a previous person. No going back. And if you say no all the way up through the 10th person, you have to take the 11th person. So according to Chris, when you start off playing the game,

when you begin to play this, people are looking at negatives. Oh, let's pretend I'm playing with a heterosexual man. He'd be like, oh, no, she's too short, or I don't like her hair color or whatever. And eventually they would get to 11 and go, whoa, I didn't expect that I'd be with a grandma. And then he'd freak out or whatever. But after playing for a while, there's this shift in strategy from looking for reasons to reject someone to looking for reasons to accept someone. Over time, the strategy shifts from that negative view to a very positive one, which what is not wrong with this person, but what is right with this person?

And then being satisfied with that choice. And over time, people begin to adopt that positive search mode. So if the designer of the circuit's computer wants Logan to find a mate that he's going to be happy about, And the limits of the technology are such that Logan can only specify yes or no and can't go back to a previous choice. Then displaying a throwaway candidate early on will make Logan more likely to find an acceptable choice sooner because he's

immediately primed to look for the positive attributes in the candidates that follow. Ta-da! It's super subtle and in fact I think when I first started talking about this, I kept talking about how bad it was, and then stumbled across this goodness, which is as good a way to get to apologetics as any. I love this game of design apologetics, because greater knowledge and awareness

usually leads us down a path of miserable nitpicking. And I'm all for good criticism, but if you can apply a design solution to account for a bad design decision in a sci-fi movie, it uses the same critical muscle, but in a different way. And the apologetics are endless. Like for example, let's take lesson number three about bad gestural interfaces. Maybe in the minority report world, people were really sedentary and these types of interfaces were the way to get people to get some frickin' exercise. Strike lesson three. Gestural interfaces might be okay.

Boom. And it leads us to our final lesson. Lesson seven. Find your own design opportunities in science fiction. Since talking sci-fi apologetics with Chris and Nathan, I can't help but look for them everywhere now. I even found one that had escaped them. We had gone off on some tangent about the Star Wars prequels.

Queen Amidala has an interface for which we cannot apologize. Which is ironic because I believe I deserve an apology for every aspect of the Star Wars prequels. On her giant silvery spaceship, I'm sure it has a name somewhere in the Star Wars canon, but I can't remember. She's got this sort of big panel of controls. But when you review it, the three times that she uses an interface aboard the ship, they are for routing a hologram or a volumetric projection across the galaxy. The second time she uses it is for summoning a star chart of a distant planet. I think it's Kenosha.

And the third is to land her spacecraft on Coruscant. But when you look at those interfaces, the actual interaction she has is to press the exact same button on the panel on the ship to do all three things and nothing else. So their gripe is that you see her using the same single button for very different tasks. Right. But I actually came up with my very own apologetic. You know, if she's the queen, she probably has a lot of underlings, and there's probably someone somewhere offscreen

who does everything for her, and this is the make it so button. I like that. There's like a computer management, communications management room somewhere on the ship, and they're just like, oh, she wants to do something. I like that. It would be hilarious if she pressed the button and a bell rang in another room.

Literally a little bell on a string. It's her dinner bell. It would be the Jeeves button. Right. Do that thing we were discussing vaguely. I hope you enjoyed that episode. We'll have fresh new episodes of Imaginary Worlds in two weeks. Meanwhile, you can like the show on Facebook.

I tweeted E. Malinsky. By the way, on the 99% Visible page for this episode, they have a lot of cool images of these control panels they mentioned. And I'll put a link to that on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.