Interaction Design Lessons from Oblivion — Why It Matters
I’m an Interaction Designer with over 20 years of experience creating experiences for kiosks, websites, mobile apps and desktop software for many well-known and not-so-well-known companies. And for more years than I want to admit, I’ve been a big fan of sci-fi interfaces and technology, especially when the concepts become reality.
It’s always fun and exciting to see how ideas that seemed so impossible only a couple of decades ago are now being prototyped and developed in labs around the world. I would often dream of being a part of that cutting edge innovation and ideation — thinking about how technology could improve lives — and then of building it and making it real.
So, several years ago I started casually observing the interfaces and technology in movies, TV shows and anime to study how people interact with them — and how they influence society for better or worse. As time went by and I started to realize how much of an impact sci-fi can really have, I wanted to turn this casual passive study into something more useful and meaningful.
As with fire, any technology can be used for great evil or great good and it is our responsibility as the creators of these technologies to ensure we’re going down the right path. In 2014, this self-imposed mission led me to become a guest author for scifiinterfaces.com, which is the companion site to the book “Make It So” by Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff.
As a guest author, I break apart all of the interfaces within a film and then use my interaction design knowledge to analyze them and derive lessons from them — both good and bad — and share them with the world.
But, why study sci-fi interfaces at all?
This seems like an interesting hobby — if you’ve got the time — but what does this have to do with my real job?
I was never really able to give a good, well-thought-out answer to why I spend so much time studying sci-fi interfaces before — or for that matter, why it would be a good idea for an established business to spend time looking at them. But a few years ago during an email exchange between authors Olli Sulopuisto of Nonfiktio and Chris Noessel that very question was asked:
“…is studying movie UIs, I dunno, useful?… Have you learned something from sci-fi interfaces that would’ve been more difficult or impossible to gain by other means?”
So, in response, Chris wrote an article, in which he gives 8 tangible benefits for studying sci-fi-interfaces. I highly recommend you read the full article yourself, but I’ll give you a quick run-down of what he says.
1. You build necessary skepticism
You might want the things you design and build to be like the stuff you see in the movies, but some of the interfaces could cause disastrous consequences in the real world. So, studying these interfaces critically builds up your design immune system.
2. You get their good ideas
This doesn’t happen all the time, but every now and then you’ll find a concept that can inform your work. The films that inspire these good ideas can behave like an advisor on your team that is only focusing on the blue sky thinking.
3. You can turn their bad ideas into good ones
Chris uses the gunner seat in the Millennium Falcon as a favorite example for this.
In the real world, sound can’t travel through space, yet every time Han Solo fires the gun, you can hear the sound of a laser firing and things exploding. But, if you really think about it, it’s actually pretty smart since you could turn it around to say that the sound is added on purpose to give some user feedback — so he knows the gun’s firing properly.
This type of exercise requires the technique of apologetics, where you carefully study what’s broken in the design and try to figure out why it’s actually brilliant.
4. You can avoid their mistakes
Of course, Sci-fi interface designers have a different goal than real-world designers. That goal is to entertain, so they don’t necessarily have to care about the same things we do.
So, when they get an interface wrong they can get it very wrong. Seeing how the actors interact with these design fails can be instructive and teach us what not to do in our own designs.
5. It’s great analytical and design practice
Chris testifies that since he has been reviewing over 100 years worth of sci-fi interfaces, he has gotten really good at quickly and thoroughly being able to review interfaces in the real world. While I definitely do not have his track record for hours spent analyzing sci-fi interfaces, this still holds true for me as well since I began studying them.
For example…
This interface from Spider-man gets less than 2 seconds of screen time, but it only took me those 2 seconds to look at this interface and see there were major problems.
When the lab is under attack, Gwen “flips” this “emergency lever” by four-finger-swiping a touchscreen.
Fortunately for everyone in the lab, Gwen is a level-headed individual — and got the warning from Spidey in plenty of time to — calmly — walk to the touchscreen and accurately swipe the “lever”. But what if the power had gone out and the emergency generator failed? What if for some reason there was low visibility and she couldn’t see the screen? Or what if for some reason she had lost the use of her hands and couldn’t effectively four-finger-swipe? These are serious problems with a touchscreen in this situation. Why not just use an analog lever? The cool, high-tech factor doesn’t make up for the poor design choices for this context.
All of that went through my head almost immediately after seeing this very short segment of the film. All thanks to the practice I’ve had taking a closer, more analytical look at the designs.
6. It’s speculative-tech literacy
It helps you become more literate in future, speculative tech. Even though you may not realize it, sci-fi is a major — sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle — influence on how designers and users think about interfaces.
Minority Report is almost 20 years old, but if someone references the pre-crime scrubber, chances are you know exactly what they’re talking about.
But, what’s good about it? What’s bad about it? What would you tell your client or design partner if they wanted to use it as a model for something you’re working on in the real world?
Having an understanding of these interfaces can definitely be a benefit when designing for stuff that doesn’t exist yet.
7. Its blind spots are rich mines
Comparing sci-fi tech with real-world tech helps lead to an understanding of the blind spots, and helps us see what we need to be thinking about but aren’t.
8. It inspires big thinking
If we as designers only work with what we know can be done with the materials we’re familiar with, there would be no real transformative innovation — only incremental improvements to what has come before.
While it is important to continuously iterate upon designs that have come before, if you want to disrupt an industry for the better, you need to remove the constraints of how it’s always been done before.
You do still need to know where we’ve been since that is an important lesson in how you can make things better in the future and to keep yourselves from repeating the same mistakes. At the same time, you shouldn’t allow that to confine you into the predefined proverbial box.
Analyzing sci-fi interfaces gives you a way to dream bigger and imagine what things would be like if the sky was the limit — and to imagine what it would be like if it could change the world for the better.
Meta and Magic Leap in the past, as well as Microsoft and a few other big companies have been looking at how augmented reality could be the new way people interact with technology and with each other.
Some experts even believe this will replace mobile phones in the very near future. It wouldn’t be like Minority Report where your arms are in an unnatural position, but more like Stark’s lab.
With augmented reality that’s done right, — emphasis on being done the right way — your body’s positioning is more natural — you’re manipulating objects as you would in real life.
It’s the neural path of least resistance and their goal is for people to be able to compute with a zero learning curve for the interfaces.
Could you get this type of inspiration somewhere other than sci-fi? What other medium other than sci-fi focuses so much on future technology and society in such an imaginative and visual way? Video games come close, but not quite since there are still the real-world constraints of the usability of the actual game and platform technology.
All that said, sci-fi interfaces are a fun and inspiring way to study, to learn and to think big.
How we go about it at Scifiinterfaces.com
The document of guidelines and constraints that we need to follow is over 2600 words, but the short version is that basically we grab high resolution clips of every — single — interface in the film.
Yes, every — single — one.
The boring, the exciting and the stuff you only see for a second. We organize them by interface and then go through each of the interfaces frame by frame. And then, taking into account reality as it is in the film’s universe, we provide context, descriptions, analysis, any lessons that can be learned and any possible ways to improve the design.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to do all of this work yourself. That’s what the website’s there for. And in the next article of this series, you will benefit from some of that hard work as I walk you through one of the projects I did for Oblivion.
Please look forward to it.
This article is the first in a series, in which I recap some of the Interaction Design lessons I derived from the Sci-Fi film Oblivion for the nerdsourcing project launched a few years ago on scifiinterfaces.com — the companion site to the book “Make It So” by Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff.
You can also check out the full project on their website.
