My Top 6 Technology Design Influences
20th and 21st century art theory belongs in technology, not on the walls of galleries.
1. E.H. Gombrich, ‘The Story of Art’
E.H. Gombrich’s defining work ‘The Story of Art’ is the ultimate compendium for all designers. His magnificent work covers the world history of art (and its associated theories), from 30,000BC to the Modernist era in the 20th century in a form that is as relevant today as it was upon its publication in 1950. Of course, it is reflective of the time and there is a distinct lack of female, LGBTQ, and minority artists; but it is crucial to read first in order to critique the conventional canon of the History of Art. As such, it remains the bedrock source of knowledge for everyone starting a serious journey into the arts. Completing the tome in its entirety is the equivalent of a BA in Art History, though it’s also easy to dip into specific chapters as needed.
2. Stanley Kubrick
A filmmaker who needs no introduction. His understanding of colour and symmetry, paired with the 1960s-70s complex relationship with the future makes for an aesthetic which all perfectionists from all eras can relate to. When thinking about product design for new technologies, it’s so important to realise that each generations’ philosophy about the distant future is heavily impacted by both the politics and prevalent artists of the time. To us, the electric red bubble chairs aboard the space ships in 2001: A Space Odyssey seem dated, even kitsch. However, the internal designs of the ships are still lightyears away from what the International Space Station could be. I often reflect upon how the politics of my time affect my work, and which set designs in Kubrick’s films still seem to be cutting edge half a century later.
3. Frank Lloyd Wright — Falling Water
The entire body of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs and how they both interacted with, and defined Modernist design theory, is worth an article on its own. However, the most appropriate of his buildings which impacts technology product design is Falling Water (1936–38). Up until this point, buildings had to fight against nature in order to function. Constructing a building, whether public, government, corporate, or private, was a battle to thrust traditional forms onto an unforgiving plot of land. This work completely re-evaluated the purpose of architecture. Rather than trying to fight against the landscape, he proposed integrating the natural defining features of a plot of land into the building itself. Coupled with new engineering breakthroughs in reinforced concrete and cantilevering, the final result is an ode to ‘leaning into it’. Specifically for wearables design, it’s important not to fight against the limitations and forms of the human body; and in terms of implementing a solution it’s important to use the geo-social context of the problem as an anchor for design, rather than something to fix.
5. Guillermo Del Toro’s Creatures
Guillermo Del Toro is the encapsulation of not ‘over teching’ something. His fantastical creatures are by the far the most believable to come out of the history of cinema. The reason why is that he has a deep understanding of the way that CGI works and its limitations. Up until recently, every CGI frame that you’ve seen has been ‘hand drawn’ by an artist (over the last 5 years, there has been an introduction of machine learning (ML) techniques into the sector, but that has its own set of problems). Yes, that means computer renders, but those renders still have to be created by someone with a degree in sculpture, and animated frame-by-frame. The closer you manage to get a shot to where you want the final image to be, the better the end result is going to be because CGI artists produce much higher quality work if you can give them something to ‘trace’ over, rather than leaving them to guess the intricacies of your inner visions. Therefore, Del Toro creates as much of his creatures as possible in person, utilising a mixture of traditional and cutting edge animatronics techniques, only dusting the top with CGI for finishing touches.
I regularly use this methodology when approaching new problems that cutting edge technology can’t fix. Recently I was awarded Komatsu’s title of one of the ‘Top 4 Tech Innovators of 2018’ for a deliberately low-tech solution to an old problem of mine bucket tooth loss. The problem is thus: steel bucket teeth get erratically ground down on site and end up going into crushers, causing major delays on site and fatalities for people retrieving the lost teeth. Contemporary RFID tags would normally be the obvious solution to this problem, but the radio signals can’t get past the thick steel of the teeth (likewise for all digital signals). So, how could we communicate the loss of a tooth on site without using digital signals? My team and I went right the way back through the history of human communication and landed on smoke signals. We created a proof of concept for a coloured bio-degradable smoke bomb system, embedded within the tooth, which would go off as soon as a tooth became dislocated from the bucket. In addition to creating an obvious signal to the site that a tooth had fallen from the bucket, the smoke also stained the tooth a bright colour, making it easier to locate either by hand, or via an image recognition system en route to the crusher.
6. Paul Franklin
You may not have heard of Paul Franklin, but you’ll already know his most famous creations. Franklin is the founder of Double Negative: one of the most prolific visual effects companies in Hollywood (based in London) and the team behind all of Christopher Nolan’s groundbreaking aesthetics. He’s won Oscars for his work on Inception and Interstellar. Franklin teaches us two very important lessons for design: firstly, how roboticists should approach new problems, and secondly how art can be used as a medium to solve scientific problems.
Franklin and I share a love of Brutalist architecture and abstract robots. TARS from Interstellar looks nothing like how the majority of movie robots look like, and this is exactly the right approach for robotics design. When solving a new problem, the best roboticists don’t think ‘how would a human do this task?’ they think ‘what are the core elements of this task, and what is the most efficient way to achieve those elements?’. For instance, when designing a robot to pick oranges from trees, the worst approach to go for is ‘let’s make a 5 axis robot arm to do this, because that is the best way a human would do it.’ Instead, a more effective design would be a wall of rotating knives and a vacuum connected via snake arm to a delivery truck.
Art and science don’t seem like easy bedfellows in the 21st century, but Franklin has shown through his black hole simulation on Interstellar that art can be a medium to solve real-world scientific problems. Both Franklin and Nolan are known for their obsessive attention to detail, and their work on Interstellar has changed the boundaries of what filmmakers can achieve. They worked with American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Dr Kip Thorne to create scientifically accurate models of the extra-terrestrial phenomena that drive the narrative of Interstellar. So accurate, in fact, that they discovered new ways that light gets bent in black holes through the code they developed called DNGR (Double Negative Gravitational Renderer). This led to the academic paper, ‘Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar’, which you can read via the University of Cornell’s library portal.
I was lucky enough to have Franklin as my mentor during my time as a professional artist, and he was one of the main supporters of my transition from the arts into technology. Like everyone, I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Alex Moss is CEO & Head Designer of Canaria: a NASA-endorsed technology company developing medical-grade wearables for use in astronaut training and the resources sector to prevent catastrophic events.
