The sci-fi interfaces project is about analysis, not to have an excuse to just to poke fun at how interfaces made for one media won’t work in another. That’s too easy, and doesn’t really give sci-fi interface designers their due. The point of the blog is really to examine these interfaces critically so we can learn lessons for our real world work.

Sometimes learning lessons is about naming the core good stuff in an interface and abstracting it a bit to formalize what we want to replicate elsewhere, as I showed with the Ultimate Weapon Against Evil.

Often it’s about catching them on problems that remind us of design heuristics that we already know, as with the 3D scanner in Ghost in the Shell.

Occasionally it’s acknowledging that the designer of a sci-fi interface has subtly different goals and constraints than a real-world designer and teasing out what does and doesn’t apply and why, as we see time and again with big labels.

Every now and then it’s about figuring out how what looks broken is really brilliant, as in the whole category of apologetics.

But sometimes, a system is so broken that none of this is possible. The Circuit is one of those interfaces. The inputs don’t make any sense. The workflow is either potentially life-threateningly catastrophic or seriously suboptimal. The output is either misleading or part of the catastrophic workflow. The distribution of control among the users is pointlessly (or sexist-ly) one-sided. There’s no diamond-in-the-rough goodness going on here for usability tweaks or apologetics.

To redesign this interface, we have to go back to the fundamentals of human psychology, the prospective technology of Logan’s run, and start almost from scratch, which is the next post.