I have, over the past several years, conducted a workshop at a handful of conferences, companies, and universities called Redesigning Star Wars. (Read more about that workshop on its dedicated page.) It’s one of my favorite workshops to run.
In April of 2016 I was invited to run the workshop at CalArts in Southern California for some of the interaction design students. Normally I ask attendees to illustrate their design ideas on paper, but the CalArts students went the extra mile to illustrate their ideas in video comps! So with complete apologies for being impossibly late, here are some of those videos.
Next up, a redesign of the Rebel bombing target computer.
Abby Chang and Julianna Bach redesigned the controls to keep the Rebel bomber’s hands on the controls, and reconsidered the display. Take a look at their video, below.
If you’d like to discuss a workshop for your org, contact workshop@scifiinterfaces.com.
While these are interesting the problem is they are proceeding from a lot of assumptions that are not necessarily accurate. For instance, noting that the “Numbers are not legible” is as absurd as complaining that the frame counter on a video editor timecode is not legible: it’s a range-to-target indicator and the speed at which the smaller digits are clocking off gives a sense of how fast they are approaching the target. The vertical red lines that slowly converge reinforce that, etc. You can tell that you’re halfway to the target when the lines are each halfway across their half of the screen. Then there’s the critique that “the indicators are confusing and not intuitive”. So are most emoji. Those icons could be very standard in that universe, much as an octagon meaning STOP is certain cultures here.
While I am not one of the designers, I will note that every single usability problem can be explained away as “known to that universe,” but we would learn nothing from that approach. You may find this post clarifying: https://scifiinterfaces.com/2019/12/13/about-the-critical-stance-of-this-blog/
Your first note is a good one. But we could use the latter to excuse almost any design failing in sci-fi, and as such, isn’t very useful to us.