Sometimes discussion and analysis of interfaces in science fiction gets into heady territory. Even art criticism nerdery. Sometimes I find a gap in language that must be patched with a neologism. Over the n years I’ve been doing this blog, they add up. Rather than redefine those terms when they appear, this page provides a single reference to what those terms are and mean. If you run across a term you think belongs here, reach out and I’ll look into adding it.
Active Academy
A proactive model for AI interactions in which questions put to it may be answered immediately, but the “academy” may continue working on it until a more thorough response can be generated. Additionally, the academy may keep the question persistent and update the user when the answer changes.
Agentive
Agentive describes a system that can perform work on behalf of its users while their attention is elsewhere, according to their preferences. It is distinct from agentic, which describes a back-end architecture in which agents handle parts of a user request.
📖 Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People
🏷️ agentive
Aposematics
A term from evolutionary science which describes the “warning signs” that species give off to others. It is informative to understand The Design of Evil, which is investigated from a human perspective most thoroughly in fiction.
🏷️ aposematics
Apologetics
A term yoinked from religious philosophy, apologetics is the practice of assuming that a seemingly broken or absurd interface is actually brilliant, and then working to justify why. The spirit of the approach is to resist dismissing things too quickly as meaningless, and instead push through to insight. Sometimes it pays off handsomely. Sometimes it fails.
Backworlding
When an interface doesn’t make sense within the diegesis, backworlding means adding a rule or idea to the story world to make it cohere. It’s a tool of apologetics: rather than faulting the makers, you try to construct a plausible diegetic reason the thing is the way it is. It is not always possible, but often illuminating.
ℹ️ A really gross example is “ecstasy meat” backworlding done for Soylent Green.
🏷️ backworlding
Deskilling
This sociotechnological term describes a negative effect of giving a task over to another for long enough that it significantly impedes the user’s performance of the skill themselves. Very useful and important for evaluating AI systems when they are acting agentively.
Diegesis
From literary criticism, this term means belonging the world of the story. Things that exist within the story world—a computer screen characters can see and touch, music playing from a radio in the scene—are diegetic. Things that exist only for the audience, outside the story world, are extradiegetic. The distinction matters enormously when analyzing sci-fi interfaces, because it determines whether we’re looking at a design decision or a narrative one.
Diegetic fluency
Movie-watching individuals become effortlessly skilled in subconsciously categorizing things as diegetic or extradiegetic. No one has to pause to remind themselves that there is no orchestra squeezed into the X-wing with Luke. This is important to analysis, because sci-fi interfaces often have extradiegetic purposes—like telegraphing danger, signaling who is responsible for what, or acknowledging a change to the narrative rules—and their diegetic failings don’t register because the actors are scripted to act as if it works, and the audience groks its narrative purpose. This contributes to the halo effects of these interfaces; that is, believing that because they look cool and the characters have no apparent problems operating them, that they are good design. Part of the raison d’être of this project is to break down that credulity, to distinguish what are actually good, useful design patterns for the real world, and what only “works” in sci-fi.
Extradiegetic
From literary criticism, this term means outside the world of the story. Things that exist for the audience but not for the characters. The classic example is the screechy violins in a horror film: the characters don’t hear them, but the audience does, and understands them as a signal about how the scene is meant to feel. In sci-fi interface analysis, an extradiegetic element is one put there for the viewer’s benefit—to signal high-tech-ness, convey plot information, or create spectacle—rather than one that would exist in the diegesis.
FUI
This acronym for “fictional user interface” was coined by late motion graphics designer Mark Coleran. It refers to the screen-based interfaces seen in sci-fi films and television. The glowing readouts, holographic displays, and animated data visualizations designed primarily for the camera rather than for actual use. Its construction is cleverly parallel to GUI, or graphic user interface.
Fuigetry
Pronounced FWIDG-it-tree, these are interface elements that carry no information and serve no utility. Fuigets often wiggle pointlessly. The term merges “FUI” with “widgets,” and was suggested by Magnus Torstensson of Unsworn Industries. Fuigetry is the interface manifestation of the broader category of meaningless sci-fi detail on the surface of sets, props, and models called greebles or dunsels. I recognize that these are ofttimes necessary, but I am generally against a sci-fi interface that amounts to nonsense.
ℹ️ Glossary: Dunsels, Nurnies, Greebles, Gundans, and Fuidgets
🏷️ fuigetry
Le Grand Imagier
Le Grand Imagier (The Great Image-Maker) is a concept in film theory and cinematic critique that refers to an implicit, omniscient narrator responsible for the selection and organization of aspects within a film. Many craftspeople contribute to it, including the writers, directors, directors of photography, and editors. In series and franchises, the grand imagier may be controlled by entirely different sets of people but with respect to prior choices. In some shows the grand imagier is quite distinct from the creators, being deliberately misleading or, as in Starship Troopers, bought into the diegetic propaganda of the story in ways that the creative team definitely are not. Originally coined by Albert Laffay in 1964, it describes an underlying agency that presents the filmic world to the viewer, serving as a “creator” or “showing” agent separate from the characters and the story itself. For our purposes it is important to understand because the grand imagier is making choices about what to show and how to show it, and those decisions inform the presentation of interfaces as well.
ℹ️ First discussed on this blog in the context of Bugonia’s Best Comedy Horror Interface in the 2026 Fritzes.
Mohs Scale of Sci-fi Hardness
A sliding scale, named by analogy with Friedrich Mohs’ scale of mineral hardness, that rates how closely a sci-fi work adheres to real-world science. At the hard end, the work rigorously applies current scientific understanding and its speculative elements are few and internally consistent. At the soft end, science is essentially set dressing—a genre signal rather than a constraint. Importantly, hardness is not a measure of quality; compelling work exists at every point on the scale. For interface analysis the scale matters because it sets expectations: an interface in hard SF invites detailed scrutiny of its plausibility, where one in a space opera does not.
📺 Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness (TV Tropes)
Narrative Proxy Sequence
A sequence in which the diegetic reality is kind of unfilmable, or even incomprehensible to the human mind. But since the filmmaker has to show something, they shift into a close-enough representation. In these types of sequences, the shift from a more literal depiction to some close-enough stand-in is not marked or explained. You just have to feel that things are uncanny, decide that you’re seeing things in a different narrative register, and interpret from there. Analysis becomes prohibitively convoluted when looking at a narrative proxy. We have to admit that it’s unavailable to the close-read analysis that this blog does.
ℹ️ Coined as part of the analysis of Bugonia, which won the Best Comedy Horror Interface in the 2026 Fritzes.
New Criticism
A school of critical theory that rejects examining art through the lens of the artists’ intents, biography, or historical circumstances. Instead, New Criticism focuses on the work itself as received by an audience: What does this thing mean to us, now? Applied to sci-fi interfaces, this means resisting the urge to explain a broken design by saying “the prop maker was on a deadline”, and instead asking whether the design holds together on its own diegetic terms. Backworlding and apologetics are tools developed in service of this stance.
Novum
From science fiction theory this term means the speculative new thing a story is built around; the premise that separates the work’s world from our own. In The Boys, it’s a chemical compound that grants superpowers. In Her, it’s a sentient operating system. The novum is usually where the story hangs its hat, which means it often gets a pass on the rigors of believability that everything else in the diegesis must meet.
Novum stack
While some sci-fi stories involve only one novum, space opera and expansive franchises tend to have several. Star Wars, for one example, includes in its novum stack faster-than-light travel, light sabers, The Force, artificial general intelligence, etc. In comparison, Star Trek has a similar stack, but does not include light sabers and does include transporters and universal translators.
Evaluating an interface requires that we understand the novum stack and how each novum interrelates for the diegesis. Imagining improvements to an interface involves making a decision of whether you intend to respect or disregard the novum stack. Apologetics can involve reinterpreting the stack. When the novum stack gets sufficiently advanced, our ability to critique an interfaces with existing design tools can collapse, making analysis prohibitively convoluted.
Over-reliance
A risk of AI systems in which users trust an AI’s output too much, i.e., accepting its results without sufficient skepticism, scrutiny, or verification. Over-reliance can lead to errors going undetected, reduced critical engagement, and a gradual erosion of the user’s own judgment in the relevant domain. It is distinct from, but related to, deskilling: a user can over-rely on a system without yet losing the underlying skill, but sustained over-reliance tends to accelerate deskilling over time.
ℹ️ Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes People Smarter (Rosenfeld Media, 2026)
Semidiegetic
Sound or other elements of a film that occupy the grey zone between diegetic and extradiegetic—neither strictly inside the story world nor fully outside it. The clearest example in film is internal voiceover: a character’s audible thoughts, which we hear but which other characters cannot. In interface terms, a semidiegetic element is one that serves the audience’s comprehension while simultaneously being ambiguously grounded in the diegesis—it could plausibly exist in the story world, but its primary job is narrative rather than diegetic. The New Criticism stance of this blog will first favor diegetic interpretations, but failing that, will fall to semidiegetic ones.
ℹ️ Film Art: An Introduction Bordwell, Thompson, & Smith (McGraw-Hill 1979)
Stoic guru
A passive model for AI interactions in which answers are only given when the system is asked. Such systems wait for a query rather than proactively working on the user’s behalf. In Star Trek the original series, Kirk discovers that travel to the Mirror Universe is possible, but the computer only told him when he asked. Contrast with the Active Academy.
Universal Assist
One of five categories of use cases by which software helps a user perform some task while their attention is on that task. The assists are Perceive, Know, Plan, Perform, and Reflect. I argue the set is exhaustive, and useful for both analyzing and improving software systems.
📖 Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes People Smarter