When it was released, Children of Men seemed a fanciful dystopia. Today with its depictions of environmental blight, terrorist bombs, refugee-phobia, and a militarized police state, it seems uncomfortably prescient. The film is sci-fi, but it doesn’t lean heavily on the use of interfaces for its storytelling. So while it will be only a handful of reviews, let’s celebrate the 10th anniversary of this dark film with some nerdy analysis.
Release Date: 05 January 2007 (USA)
Plot
In the year 2010, humanity suddenly suffers from global infertility. Most of the world is thrown into chaos, but Britian soliders on under military rule. Refugees in this society are considered a threat to the nation, and they are routinely rounded up and deported or killed.
In 2027, one member of this society, named Theo Faron, is dutifully trudging on with his life when he is kidnapped and taken to meet his estranged wife Julian, now the leader of a secretive and militaristic refugee-rights organization. She convinces him to use his relationship to his powerful cousin Nigel to arrange transportation papers for a young woman. When Theo delivers the papers, he learns that the young woman, named Kee, is pregnant. Shocked at this symbol of hope, he protects her from a society that hates her, a government that will kill her, and the refugee-rights organization who wants to use the child for their own ends, escorting her at great personal cost to a fabled boat that can protect and nurture her and her child and thereby the future of humanity.
In a very brief scene, Theo walks through a security arch on his way into the Ministry of Energy. After waiting in queue, he walks towards a rectangular archway. At his approach, two horizontal green laser lines scan him from head to toe. Theo passes through the arch with no trouble.
Though the archway is quite similar to metal detection technology used in airports today, the addition of the lasers hints at additional data being gathered, such as surface mapping for a face-matching algorithm.
We know that security mostly cares about what’s hidden under clothes or within bodies and bags, rather than confirming the surface that security guards can see, so it’s not likely to be an actual technological requirement of the scan. Rather it is a visual reminder to participants and onlookers that the scan is in progress, and moreover that this the Ministry is a secured space.
Though we could argue that the signal could be made more visible, laser light is very eye catching and human eyes are most sensitive at 555nm, and this bright green is the closest to the 808 diode laser at 532nm. So for being an economic, but eye catching signal, this green laser is a perfect choice.
Jasper is a longtime friend of Theo’s who offers his home as a safe house for a time. Jasper’s civilian vehicle features a device on its dashboard that merits some attention. It is something like a small laptop computer, with a flat-screen in a roughly pill-shaped black plastic frame mounted in the center of the dashboard. The top half of this screen shows a view from a backward-facing camera mounted on the vehicle.
The lower half shows a number of different mode- and context-aware displays. The first we see is an overhead schematic of the vehicle, showing pulses moving back and forth from the front to the rear of the car, similar to Prius dash displays that display the transfer of power between the brakes and the battery.
As the vehicle nears Jasper’s house, the overhead schematic view draws up and is replaced with a column of text, which is in turn replaced by a circular object with animated rays projecting from it. Neither Jasper nor Theo gives the screen any notice during the scene.
Several dings
It’s dangerous to ask drivers to parse columns of text while operating a vehicle. Information must be glanceable.
The monochrome display seems to unnecessarily constrain the color palette. It’s good to give color-blind users modes that optimize the display for monochrome, and if we’re being generous, we can presume Jasper’s done just that.
But on the other hand, the monochrome minimizes the distractions that the mode switching causes. Note that the rapid changes that happen when Jasper is not on open road, but nearing a building. His attention should be on navigating the space ahead of him rather than on the screen. Maybe the monochrome helps ameliorate this.
Lastly note that the dashboard also features a full keyboard beneath the screen, positioned for the drivers use. Since we never see it in use, let’s hope it’s not actually meant to be used while driving. Better would be a more suitable input mechanism like voice that doesn’t occupy the driver’s hands and eyes to use.
But wait
But those dings make more sense when we consider the interface narratively. The big clue is why would it persistently show a backward-facing camera when he’s driving forward? Can’t he just use the rear-view mirror? It seems to be something a normal driver wouldn’t concern themselves with. But it is something that a member of an underground resistance might be interested in, to use computer vision algorithms to help him know if he or she was being tailed or there was some threat behind him. That clue (along with the contrast to Syd’s car display) hints that this is not an off-the-shelf system, but something that Jasper has hacked together for himself. Maybe the software is shared amongst resistance members.
In any case, a homemade system can’t be expected to have the same level of usability as a professionally designed one. So narratively, this interface earns a pass.
If Jasper’s car is aftermarket, Syd’s built-in display seems to be more consumer-savvy. It is a blue electroluminescent flat display built into the dashboard. It has more glanceable information with a cleaner information hierarchy. It has no dangerous keyboard entry. All we see of the display in these few glimpses is the speedometer, but even that’s enough to illustrate these differences.
When Luke is driving Kee and Theo to a boat on the coast, the car’s heads-up-display shows him the car’s speed with a translucent red number and speed gauge. There are also two broken, blurry gauges showing unknown information.
Suddenly the road becomes blocked by a flaming car rolled onto the road by a then unknown gang. In response, an IMPACT warning triangle zooms in several times to warn the driver of the danger, accompanied by a persistent dinging sound.
This post is about the speculative suicide kit called Quietus that appears in Children of Men.
Suicide is not an easy topic and I will do my best to address it seriously. Let me first take a moment to direct anyone who is considering or dealing with suicide to please stop reading this and talk to someone about it. I am unqualified to address—and this blog is not the place to work through—such issues.
In fact because this is a serious life-and-death issue, I’m going against my usual scifiinterfaces tack of thinking through this as a real-world product. While I believe in our right to self-direct our deaths with dignity in the face of terminal illness or longterm suffering, I also believe that it should be handled by caring, informed, and professional people rather than a kit. So, instead, I’m only going to address the design in the context of the film. It would take much more research, time, and the input of many professionals to confidently design for such a product in the real world.
So, on to Quietus, as part of the movie.
The booklet
When Theo visits his friend Jasper’s home, we are introduced to the blue kit, open on the coffee table between them. Theo reads out of a booklet that comes with it, “Is there a chance it will not work for me? There have been no cases of anyone surviving who has taken the preparation.” Afterward their conversation quickly veers off in another direction.
Ads
In the subsequent scene, when Theo is woken up by an alarm on his television, an ad for Quietus is playing. In it we read the tagline, “You Decide When,” and read three benefits being sold by the ad.
Up to £2,000 to your next of kin.
Painless transition guaranteed.
Illegals welcome.
The visuals include a man determinately drinking some clear blue liquid in a glass with a Quietus logo, before standing up and walking across a beach toward the surf, only to fade away.
Later, when Theo runs after one of London’s double-decker busses, we see the video ad again on the side of the bus, repeating the tag line and the benefit, “Up to £2,000 to your next of kin.”
In use
In a deeply moving scene (among many in this film) Jasper eventually uses the kit to kill his longtime-unresponsive wife Janice, before the Fishes extremist group comes to their house to kill them.
Evaluation
Quietus is not central to the plot. There are other ways Jasper could have spared his wife a terrible death or mistreatment at the hands of the Fishes.
Rather, Quietus is a narrative, worldbuilding prop that helps us understand the world of the story. It helps us to understand that people are so desperate and depressed they are willing, at mass scale, to consider suicide. It helps us to understand that the government is facing such a terrible lack of resources that it has to incentivize this suicide to keep its population to some manageable level, to those who can still press on. It helps to underscore how important the sound of children’s voices are to most of the world’s sense of hope and purpose.
Given that narrative purpose, the design of the kit is sublime.
The name frames the kit as a positive, peaceful thing. Even the “–us” suffix helps tell the story by appealing to a collective sense. It’s to “quiet us.” The word sounds Latinate and thereby educated, medical, trustworthy. It focuses on a result, i.e. quiet, and distracts from its morbidness.
The logotype looks like it is set in a modified Times New Roman or Garamond (can anyone identify it?), and the letter spacing is wide; signaling familiarity, trust and serenity.
The kit comes with a glass with the logo to give a sense of ritual and importance, reinforce the brand promise, and help the participants get the measurements right.
The repeated use of sky-blue color and white beams in the ad, the box, and the liquid speak to freedom, spirituality, and something greater than ourselves.
The professional design of the kit (its advertisement, the printed graphics on the box) and its high production quality (a glass, a little bottle for the drug, the glossy cardboard of the 4-color printed box, the vacuum-formed plastic that holds these and the booklet) helps us understand the scope of the initiative. This is not something a ragtag group has cobbled together, but an expensive, professional offering.
The reimbursement helps us infer that the reasons the government is offering it are financial.
Welcoming “illegals” reinforces that politically, this world is defined by the refugee crisis, which points to the larger infertility world crisis that gave it rise.
I can imagine two improvements that might increase believability for the story.
The logotype on the glass should be the same one as everywhere else. (We see a closeup of the different logo in the TV ad, see above.) I suspect this is a production error, but the angles of the Futura-like typeface seem cold and precise, off-brand from what we see elsewhere. It doesn’t add anything to have them mismatched, and detracts a bit from the professional, trustworthy veneer.
The organization promises a financial incentive to participants’ next of kin. This adds a believability complication. How would the organization confirm deaths while protecting against fraud?
1. Someone contacts Quietus and says, “I’m about to kill myself with Quietus. Send the money to mycousin John at the following account.” (1a. Doesn’t actually kill themselves. 1b. May actually be the John in question.)
2. Someone contacts Quietus and says, “I’ve just found the body of my cousin John, and a note reading I am to receive money from Quietus.” (2a. John may not be dead. 2b. John may not even be aware of this scam. 2c. Or the cousin may have killed John.)
Presuming that the government still seeks to process cadavers rather than let them decay at the place of death, the local coroner would still be involved in processing the body, and could be used as the source of confirmation of actual death, identity of the body, and relationship to the recipient. To embody this, there would need to be some easy way (and incentive) for the coroner to report the death back to Quietus. This points at a missing artifact in the movie.
I’d recommend a bracelet or necklace in the kit with a blue Quietus background, the logo, and a QR code or large ID number, meant to be worn by the participant prior to taking the drink and later noticed and used by the coroner. Medicalert would be a good, recognizable model for production. In the scene, Jasper would glance at it briefly and discard it, but it would be a nice rounding out of the logic of the service.
Perhaps the most unusual interface in the film is a game seen when Theo visits his cousin Nigel for a meal and to ask for a favor. Nigel’s son Alex sits at the table silent and distant, his attention on a strange game that it’s designer, Mark Coleran, tells me is called “Kubris,” a 3D hybrid of Tetris and Rubik’s Cube.
Alex operates the game by twitching and sliding his fingers in the air. With each twitch a small twang is heard. He suspends his hand a bit above the table to have room. His finger movements are tracked by thin black wires that extend from small plastic discs at his fingertips back to a device worn on his wrist. This device looks like a streamlined digital watch, but where the face of a clock would be are a set of multicolored LEDs arranged in rows. These LEDs flicker on and off in inscrutable patterns, but clearly showing some state of the game. There is an inset LED block that also displays an increasing score.
The game also features a small, transparent, flat screen that rests on the table in front of him. It displays a computer-generated cube, similar to a 5×5 Rubik’s Cube, made up of smaller transparent cubes that share colors with the LEDs on his wrist. As Alex plays, he changes the orientation of the cube, and positions smaller cubes along the surface of the larger.
Alex plays this game continually during the course of the scene. He is so engrossed in it that when Nigel asks him twice to take his pills, he doesnt even register the instruction. Nigel must yell at him to get Alex to comply.
Though the exact workings of the game are a mystery, it serves to illustrate in a technological way how some of the younger people in 2027 disengage from the horror of the world through games that have been designed for addiction and obsession.
When Theo, Kee, and Miriam flee the murderous Fishes, they take refuge in Jasper’s home for the night. They are awoken in the morning by Jasper’s sentry system.
A loud cacophonous alarm sounds, made up of what sounds like recorded dog barks, bells clanging, and someone banging a stick on a metal trash can lid. Jasper explains to everyone in the house that “It’s the alarm! Someone’s breaking in!”
They gather around a computer screen with large speakers on either side. The screen shows four video feeds labeled ROAD A, FOREST A, FRONT DOOR, and ROAD B. Labels reading MOTION DETECTED <> blink at the bottom of the ROAD A and ROAD B feeds, where we can see members of the Fishes removing the brush that hides the driveway to Jasper’s house.
The date overlays the upper right hand corner of the screen, 06-DEC-2027, 08:10:58.
Across the bottom is a control panel of white numbers and icons on red backgrounds.
A radio button control for the number of video feeds to be displayed. Though we are seeing the 4-up display, the icon does not appear to be different than the rest.
16 enumerated icons, the purpose for which is unclear.
Video control icons for reverse, stop, play, and fast forward.
Three buttons with gray backgrounds and icons.
A wide button blinking MASTER ALARM
The scene cuts to Jasper’s rushing to the car outside the home, where none of the cacophony can be heard.
Similar to his car dashoard, it makes sense that Jasper has made this alarm himself. This might explain the clunky layout and somewhat inscrutable icons. (What do the numbers do? What about that flower on the gray background?)
The three jobs of an intruder alarm
Jasper’s alarm is OK. It certainly does the job of grabbing the household’s attention, which is the first job of an alarm, and does it without alerting the intruders, as we see in the shot outside the house.
It could do a bit better at the second job of an alarm, which is to inform the household of the nature of the problem. That they have to gather around the monitor takes precious time that could be used for making themselves safer. It could be improved by removing this requirement.
If Jasper had added more information to the audio alarm, even so basic as a prerecorded “Motion on the road! Motion on the road!” then they might not have needed to gather around the monitor at all.
If the relevant video feeds could be piped to wearable devices, phones, or their car, then they can fill in their understanding at the same time that they are taking steps to getting the hell out of there.
Having the artificial intelligence that we have in actual-world 2017 (much less speculative 2027), we know that narrow AI can process that video to have many more details in the broadcast message. “Motion on the road! I see three cars and at least a dozen armed men!”
There is arguably a third job of an advanced alarm, and this is to help the household understand the best course of action. This can be problematic when the confidence of the recommendation is low. But if the AI can confidently make a recommendation, it can use whatever actuators it has to help them along their way.
It could be informational, such as describing the best option. The audio alarm could encourage them to “Take the back road!” It could even alert the police (though in the world of Children of Men, Jasper would not trust them and they may be disinclined to care.)
The alarm could give some parameters and best-practice recommendations like, “You have 10 minutes to be in the car! Save only yourselves, carry nothing!”
It could keep updating the situation and the countdown so the household does not have to monitor it.
It can physically help as best it can, like remotely starting and positioning cars for them.
This can get conceptually tricky as the best course of action may be conditional, e.g. “If you can get to the car in 5 minutes, then escape is your best option, but if it takes longer or you have defenses, then securing the home and alerting the police is the better bet.” But that may be too much to process in the moment, and for a household that does not rehearse response scenarios, the simpler instruction may be safer.
After Jasper tells a white lie to Theo, Miriam, and Kee to get them to escape the advancing gang of Fishes, he returns indoors. To set a mood, he picks up a remote control and presses a button on it while pointing it at a display.
He watches a small transparent square that rests atop some things in a nook. (It’s that decimeter-square, purplish thing on the left of the image, just under the lampshade.) The display initially shows an album queue, with thumbnails of the album covers and two bright words, unreadably small. In response to his button press, the thumbnail for Franco Battiato’s album FLEURs slides from the right to the left. A full song list for the album appears beneath the thumbnail. Then track two, the cover of Ruby Tuesday, begins to play. A small thumbnail to the right of the album cover appears, featuring some white text on a dark background and a cycling, animated border. Theo puts the remote control down, picks up the Quietus box, and walks over to Janice. *sniff*
This small bit of speculative consumer electronics gets around 17 seconds of screen time, but we see enough to consider the design.
Persistent display
One very nice thing about it is that it is persistently visible. As Marshall McLuhan famously noted, we are simply not equipped with earlids. This means that when music is playing in a space, you can’t really just turn away from it to stop listening. You’ll still hear it. In UX parlance, sound is non-modal.
Yet with digital music players, the visual displays that tell you about what’s being played, or the related interfaces that help you know what you can do with the music are often hidden behind modes. Want to know what that song you can’t stop hearing is? Find your device, wake it up, enter a password, find the app, and even then you may have to root around to find the software to find what you’re looking for.
But a persistent object means that non-modal sound is accompanied by (mostly) non-modal visuals. This little box is always somewhere, glowing, and telling you what’s playing, what just played, and what’s next.
Remote control
Finding the remote is a different problem, of course, and if your household is like my household, it is a thing which seems to want to be lost. To keep that non-modality of sound matched by the controls, it would be better to have the device or the environment know when Jasper is looking at the display, and enable loose gestural or voice controls to control it.
Imagine the scene if he grabs the Quietus box, looks up to the display, and says, “Play…” then pause while he considers his options, and says “…‘Ruby Tuesday’…the Battiato one.” We would have known that his selection has deep personal meaning. If Cuarón wanted to convey that this moment has been planned for a while, Jasper could even have said, “Play her goodbye song.”
Visual layout
The visual design of the display is, like most of the technology, meant to be a peripheral thing, accepting attention but not asking for it. In this sense it works. The text is so small the audience is not tempted to read it. The thumbnails are so small it is only if you already knew the music that it would refresh your memory. But if this was a real product meant to live in the home, I would redesign the display to be usable at the 3–6 meter distance, which would require vastly reducing the number of elements, increasing their size, and perhaps overlaying text on image.
Jumping back in the film a bit, we’re going to visit the Ministry of Art. When Theo goes there to visit his brother, after the car pulls to the front of the secured building, Theo steps out and walks toward a metal-detector gate.
Its quite high, about 3 meters tall. The height helps to reinforce the notion that this is a public space.
This principle, that short ceilings are personal, and high ceilings are public, is I believe a well-established one in architectural design. Read the Alexandrian pattern if you’d like to read more about it.
Is it a public space? It is, since it’s a Ministry. But it isn’t, since he joins his brother in what looks like a rich person’s private dining room. I was always a bit confused by what this place was meant to be. Perhaps owning to The Dark Times, Nigel has cited Minister rights and cordoned off part of the Tate Modern to live in. If anyone can explain this, please speak up.
On the downside, the height makes the text more out of sight and harder to read by the people meant to be reading it.
The distance is balanced by the motion graphics of the translucent sign atop the gate. Animated red graphics point the direction of ingress, show a security stripe pattern, and provide text instructions.
Motion is a very strong attention-getting signal, and combined with the red colors, does all the attention-getting that the height risks. But even that’s not a critical issue, as there is of course a guard standing by to ensure his understanding and compliance.
Note that there is no interaction here (which is the usual filter for this blog), but since I’m publishing an interview with the designer of this and the Kubris interface soon, I thought I’d give it a quick nod.
