Stark Tower monitoring

6 Oct 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Since Tony disconnected the power transmission lines, Pepper has been monitoring Stark Tower in its new, off-the-power-grid state. To do this she studies a volumetric dashboard display that floats above glowing shelves on a desktop.

Volumetric elements

The display features some volumetric elements, all rendered as wireframes in the familiar Pepper’s Ghost (I know, I know) visual style: translucent, edge-lit planes. A large component to her right shows Stark Tower, with red lines highlighting the power traveling from the large arc reactor in the basement through the core of the building.

The center of the screen has a similarly-rendered close up of the arc reactor. A cutaway shows a pulsing ring of red-tinged energy flowing through its main torus.

This component makes a good deal of sense, showing her the physical thing she’s meant to be monitoring but not in a photographic way, but a way that helps her quickly locate any problems in space. The torus cutaway is a little strange, since if she’s meant to be monitoring it, she should monitor the whole thing, not just a quarter of it that has been cut away.

Flat elements

The remaining elements in the display appear on a flat plane.

To her upper left a spectrum analysis shows bars all near the middle, and the status is confirmed with a label as REACTOR OUTPUT NORMAL. Notably the bars are bright cyan at their top and fade to darker near their bases, drawing attention to the total arc. There few bands that are lower or higher than others are immediately visible from the contrast. That’s good visual design for attention management.

In the top center is a ring chart with three bands of colors: slate gray, cyan, and dark red. A large percentage read out in the center hovers around 90%. To her upper right are three other ring charts with the same color scheme. Above the three rings is a live trend line chart in red with a separate line in white (Target? Trend line?). A tiny side view of Stark Tower stands to the left of the three rings and trend line. The purpose of these are unclear as the labels are too small to read, but it seems strange to have the physical representation here. If the rings or trend lines are related to the physical tower, how they are related is unclear. If they are unrelated, having the rendering present there is misleading.

In a band across the middle are some tiny text blocks spitting out lines of data and auto scrolling. There are more of these, so for ease of reference, let’s call them teletype boxes. They look too small and move too fast to convey much meaning, as such things often do.

The lower left of the screen has a dim white section labeled MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT. It contains a 3D cuboid with a wildly undulating surface. As this shape doesn’t match anything else in the display, nor is it visually connected, its utility is unclear. If she is meant to track some variable other than undulationness, I can’t see how this would help. Also in this panel are some sliders wildly sliding back and forth, and some more teletype boxes.

In the lower center part of the screen is an overhead-view wireframe of the reactor that does not change in this segment, as well as a dim white box that appears to contain a static formula.

This display is not fit to Pepper’s task

Sadly, Gwen Paltrow looks a little wall-eyed here, so it’s hard to tell where exactly where she’s looking to determine as she says that “Levels are holding steady.” Her gaze appears roughly above the large ring chart, so let’s presume she’s looking there. If she is actually meant to be monitoring a set of levels to determine if they’re fluctuating or not, the ring chart and percentage are the wrong display types. These are valuable for showing a state that doesn’t change very often, i.e. where change over time is not of concern.

Sure, she might be able to suss out the steadiness of the variables by focusing on the percentage and the ring chart elements to see if they’re currently wobbling, but that requires her to keep her focus there to observe what’s happening with those pixels. That puts an unnecessary burden on her attention and short term memory. What if she has to glance away for a few seconds, and in those seconds, levels begin to wobble unsteadily? Sure, an alert could sound, but when she looks back she’ll have no idea what has happened while her attention was elsewhere. Humane interfaces remove unnecessary burdens from their users, and this display should do the same.

Use line charts and sparklines to show change over time

For any variable that is meant to be monitored for changes over time—like the scripted steadiness of levels—the line chart or sparkline is much more fit to task. Each plots variables over time, so even if a user glances away for a bit, it’s not a problem, she can look back and quickly suss out what’s been happening. The thing she’s looking at should look more like a ECG than a page out of an annual report.

Main Power Board

12 Aug 2015 by claytonbeese

To restore the power that Nedry foolishly shut down (and thereby regain a technological advantage over the dinosaurs), Dr. Sattler must head into the utility bunker that routes power to different parts of the park.

Once she is there Hammond, back in the Visitors Center, communicates to her via two-way radio that operating it is a two part process: Manually providing a charge to the main panel, and then closing each of the breakers.

The Main Panel

To restore a charge to the main panel, she manually cranks a paddle (like a kinetic-powered watch, radio, or flashlight), then firmly pushes a green button labeled “Push to Close”. We hear a heavy click inside the panel as the switch flips something, and then the lights on the Breaker Panel list light up green.

Now that she has built up a charge in the circuit, she has to turn on each of the breakers one by one.

The Breakers

Each individual circuit has a dedicated button to open/close it. Each is switched with a simple illuminated button protected by a heavy, clear pushbutton cover that has to be opened manually.

Green indicates that the circuit has tripped, and power is not flowing to that part of the park. Red means that the circuit is closed and live. Slowly, one by one, Dr. Sattler flips the cover and presses the red button for each part of the breaker panel. These switches are clearly labeled as HERBIVORE FEEDING COMPOUND, or VISITORS CNTR.

As she flips each circuit on, red lights behind the label turn on.

The Circuit Breakers

The pushbutton covers do a good job of protecting against inadvertent flips, but could be made better by having hinges that close them automatically. It is unlikely that someone would accidentally push one of the buttons, but the high-risk nature of the panel begs for more protection. Spring hinges would also make closing the panel up after service quicker.

A second consideration is an emergency scenario: there is no obvious way to flip all the circuits off at once, or turn them all back on quickly. Here, all that extra time is super dramatic since it happens to save Dr. Grant and the kids, hanging at this same moment as they are from the unpowered electrified fence. But if someone was trying to reactivate the park quickly, to say, save the visitors from being eaten, this circuit-by-circuit method takes a surprising amount of time.

Labeling & Color

The labeling here is good, but could still be better. The lights are the first thing to draw attention, but it’s actually the charging panel that needs to be tended to first. A good flowchart of how a person is supposed to use the panel would be an effective addition; as would a map showing which labeled breaker leads to which area of the park.

At first the red-and-green colors are backwards, but it turns out a longstanding standard within electrical engineering uses red to indicate “shock hazard” rather than “operating normally”, so this color coding is actually OK. But it might be more effective to only light up the breakers’ labels when power is actually flowing to them. For someone not experienced with the interface or electrical engineering conventions, having a few of the breakers active and a few flipped could be extremely confusing. Are the lit ones active? Inactive? Is power flowing to the panels with lights?

This panel would be a solid candidate for usability testing.

Loki’s glaive: Mojo Radiator

26 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Loki’s wants to take down the Avengers and the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, to disable the two greatest threats to his invading forces. To accomplish this, he lets himself get captured and the glaive taken away from him, knowing Banner would study it, fall prey to one of its terrible effects, become the ragemonster, and wreck the place.

That effect goes unnamed in the film so I’ll call it the bad mojo radiator. The longer people hang around it, the more discord it sows. In fact just before Loki’s thralls enact a daring rescue of him, we see all of the Avengers fighting in the lab, for no other reason than they stand in the glaive’s presence.

The infighting ends suddenly when Banner unintentionally takes the glaive in hand as he attempts to silence the group. Because the threat of Hulk + glaive is enough to make other fights seem secondary.

We never see Loki triggering this ability of the glaive. Is it just a default, going on at all times? That seems problematic if you needed allies around you to behave, or even take disguise and hide amidst people for any length of time. So maybe that’s not the most useful design.

What if this bad mojo was actually triggered, just passively? What if it starts quietly humming its Song of Discord when it is separated from its appointed wielder for some length of time? This would be an excellent anti-theft device, and even one that would make it hard to keep it hidden long.

How might we use this sort of strategy beyond the world-conquering semi-mystical, fictional sort? This strategy is one step beyond the authenticated-users-only constraints of smart weapons, adding a layer of deterrence from possession. Imagine if a gun pulled from its authorized user shocked the holder or occasionally sprayed malodor? Or a car that turned its volume increasingly louder after it was reported stolen? You can be sure the thieves wouldn’t keep it for long.

Loki’s glaive: Teleconferencing

21 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

When his battalion of thralls are up and ~~harvesting Vespene Gas~~ working to stabilize the Tesseract, Loki sits down to check in with his boss’ two-thumbed assistant, an MCU-recurring weirdo who goes unnamed in the movie, but which the Marvel wiki assures me is called The Other.

To get into the teleconference, Loki sits down on the ground with the glaive in his right hand and the blue stone roughly in front of his heart. He closes his eyes, straightens his back, and as the stone glows, the walls around him seem to billow away and he sees the asteroidal meeting room where The Other has been on hold (listening to some annoying Chitauri Muzak no doubt).

The Other does not see the Loki sitting on the ground in MCU-prime (MCU-1°). Instead, he addresses the avatar of Loki (in MCU-2°) which appears with a cyan projection-ray flourish, in Asgardian costume. In addition to the alteration of his appearance, the glaive looks different. It is much taller and thinner, and its blades more pronounced in this projection, i.e. looking more like a real scepter.

Now, that’s a scepter.

From an interface standpoint, there is one thing to note and four questions for this interface.

Nota Bene

Note the modification of appearances. The teleconference could have worked like a video camera, showing Loki cross-legged on the floor. In the Make It So book I argued that advanced communication systems should interpret, not just report, and that’s what the glaive is doing here. The altered appearance is better for Loki since he needs to project an air of authority and command in the situation, and the regal accoutrements helps him do that. If only we knew how he selected the outfit. Was there some system setup? Is it just the default? Is this mystically how he sees himself? Of course The Other knows he’s looking at a representation and isn’t completely buying into it, but how much worse for Loki would this meeting gone if he showed up like a schlub?

Questions that need answering before it can really be evaluated.

One: What do others around MCU-1° Loki see. How do thralls know he’s in teleconference? That’s important so they know not to interrupt him unless it’s really important. My guess is the glowing crystal. Between that and Loki’s closed eyes, any onlooker could suss out that he was in a call. (For comparison/contrast, I noted a similar signal in The Fifth Element headsets.)

Two: What’s the degree of immersion. Can teleconference Loki hear anything in MCU-1°? If so how does he know which universe a given sound comes from? If MCU-1° is softened, what’s the threshold by which it is let through? Can a thrall yell to get his attention? If MCU-1° is completely muted enemies would have a massive advantage over him while in teleconference.

Three: How does he control the avatar? In MCU-1°, he’s seated and unmoving, so let’s presume it’s a control-by-mind interface. Certainly quite a natural control mechanism (with a perfectly mapped interface).

Finally: How does he control the interface? If the system is perfectly immersive, he needs some set of escape codes to tell the interface, “I want to leave this teleconference now,” or “Paused to humiliate a thrall,” or “No bars, let me call you back.” He might be able to do it with thought, of course, but it might be more useful to imagine a gesture or spoken command to do the same.

Sadly, we don’t get to see how we does this, because the Other bullies him out of the conference with a mean gesture: The Other pushes his hand against Loki’s head and *poof* he’s suddenly out of conference. And while Loki’s movements in MCU-2° don’t require his movement in MCU-1°, his MCU-1° head does move after being shoved by the Other’s gesture.

That’s an awesome narrative moment to show the audience that Loki has made a deal with some guys more powerful than him and who show him no respect. As powerful as he is, he might be out of his depths, and the stakes are real.

Loki’s glaive: Enthrallment

19 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

Several times throughout the movie, Loki uses places the point of the glaive on a victim’s chest near their heart, and a blue fog passes from the stone to infect them: an electric blackness creeps upward along their skin from their chest until it reaches their eyes, which turn fully black for a moment before becoming the same ice blue of the glaive’s stone, and we see that the victim is now enthralled into Loki’s servitude.

The glaive is very, very terribly designed for this purpose.

It freaks the victim out (or should, anyway)

Look at that damned thing. It looks like an elven shiv. A can opener for human flesh. When a victim sees it coming, he will reasonably presume it’s going to split them like a fresh-caught fish, and do whatever he or she can to flail away from it. See how Loki has to grab Hawkeye by the wrist? That’s because short of some sort of hypnosis, Hawkeye would not just stand there like that with Orcrist slicing towards his sternum. We have to backworld some sort of pre-enthrallment mind effect to explain why he’s not jerking in the other direction. As all great propaganda and persuasion masters know, you can’t approach as a threat, or the victim’s fight-or-flight might kick in and slam that window shut for winning their hearts and minds.

It might, in fact, slice the target open

Even if there’s some mystical roofie thing going on to calm the victim, if Loki had too much force behind his approach, or someone bumped either of them, the glaive could go into the victim, causing a shock of pain that might wake them up before the enthrallment could take place. Or worse, it could actually damage the heart and kill the victim, which is counter to Loki’s goal.

It requires precision, control, and time

To avoid the disheartening of an intended victim, then, Loki has to grab them, momentarily hypnotize them into calmness, and carefully ease the thing up to the target, and hold it and them in place for a few. Imagine a button on a keyboard that had to be touched with feather pressure, or it would brick the machine. This would not be a great keyboard. All these are expensive dependencies, and the time it takes is time for onlookers to intervene (or to somehow incapacitate the victim to save them.)

It tips its hand

OK, fine, the glowing-blue eyes might be an unavoidable side effect of the “tech”—and yes, I understand it’s very valuable narrative purpose to signal enthrallment—but if you were designing an enthrallment tech, you’d want to avoid such an obvious “tell,” especially right there in the main location people target when looking at other people.

A redesign

So there are a lot of ways this is less than ideal. Fortunately we don’t have to call iGlaive and tell them to shutter operations. I think we can fix this in one of a few ways.

Soften the industrial design? No.

The glaive needs to stay looking evil, and being sharp and pointy helps with that.

1. Have the glaive pull them in

A cinematic hack might be to visually imply that the glaive helps with these problems. Imagine Loki approaching Hawkeye with the glaive outstretched, and the blue fog appears and pulls Hawkeye towards its point. The point of contact can glow slightly, implying some protection, and the crystal can glow to do its enthralling. Now it’s a feature, not a bug.

2. Go broadside

If for some plot or cinematic reason that wouldn’t work, you could have Loki use the broad side of the glaive against the chest of the person. Slapping it like an oar onto someone would be a fast gesture that wouldn’t need a lot of precision to get the crystal near the heart. It could even enable sneakier attacks from the side. It might prove cinematically problematic when enthralling a female character, but since that doesn’t happen on screen in The Avengers, it’s moot.

3. A new gesture

If Loki isn’t the broadside sort, you could keep the staff the same and redesign the gesture. The mind is the thing enthralled, so it’s tempting to have it located on a forehead or neck, but we can’t have Loki gesturing to the victim’s head, because then we lose the awesome moment near the climax when Loki tries and fails to enthrall Stark on his chest reactor. So let’s keep it cardiac. Maybe we can change the relationship of the glaive to the victim.

Imagine if he lays the glaive across his left forearm, (or better: cuts into his own skin, which would explain why he just doesn’t keep enthralling everyone in sight) which begins to glow with the blue fog, and he uses a pointing index finger to tap the victim’s heart. A finger-to-sternum interaction would telegraph a lot less danger, risk fewer victims’ lives, and enable speed with less apparent precision required. As above, it might be problematic to enthrall a woman without the audience going OMG BOOBS, but again, we’re saved from that problem by the script.

In many ways this is my favorite of the redesigns. It’s a Natural User Interface. With blue fog.

Any of those tweaks might help us believe in the interaction and useful for us to keep in mind: requiring great precision of our users only slows them down and keeps them focused on the interface rather than their goals.

J.D.E.M. LEVEL 5

8 May 2015 by Christopher Noessel

The first computer interface we see in the film occurs at 3:55. It’s an interface for housing and monitoring the tesseract, a cube that is described in the film as “an energy source” that S.H.I.E.L.D. plans to use to “harness energy from space.” We join the cube after it has unexpectedly and erratically begun to throw off low levels of gamma radiation.

The harnessing interface consists of a housing, a dais at the end of a runway, and a monitoring screen.

Avengers-cubemonitoring-07 — Fury walks past the dais they erected *just because*.

The housing & dais

The harness consists of a large circular housing that holds the cube and exposes one face of it towards a long runway that ends in a dais. Diegetically this is meant to be read more as engineering than interface, but it does raise questions. For instance, if they didn’t already know it was going to teleport someone here, why was there a dais there at all, at that exact distance, with stairs leading up to it? How’s that harnessing energy? Wouldn’t you expect a battery at the far end? If they did expect a person as it seems they did, then the whole destroying swaths of New York City thing might have been avoided if the runway had ended instead in the Hulk-holding cage that we see later in the film. So…you know…a considerable flaw in their unknown-passenger teleportation landing strip design. Anyhoo, the housing is also notable for keeping part of the cube visible to users near it, and holding it at a particular orientation, which plays into the other component of the harness—the monitor.

The monitor

In the underground laboratory, an (unnamed?) technician warns lead scientist Selvig that, “it’s spiking again,” and the camera pans down to this monitoring interface.

Header

The header is a static barcode followed by the initialism J.D.E.M. along with its full name, the Joint Dark Energy Mission. (Sounds super cool and sci-fi, right? Turns out it is a real program between NASA and the US DOE.) Another label across the top identifies the screen as LEVEL 5 and that it belongs to PROJECT PEGASUS and NASA.

3D map

A main display shows a 3D wireframe of the tesseract, with color-coded nebula-like shapes within the cube. The wireframe (and most of the text on screen) are a bright cyan, with internal features progressing in color from the cyan through white to a blood red, all the way to lens flares near the most active areas in the cube. The color choices make for a quick read of what is “cool” and what is “hot,” so are effective for being immediate, but if the lens flares are designed into the system to indicate peakness, it’s a bad choice for obscuring other data in the display.

Note that the wireframe of the cube is also rotating slightly, which is very helpful for a user to more fully understand 3D information from a 2D screen. It might be even better mapping with less cognitive load if the display was a volumetric projection. (VPs exist within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but so far I believe we’ve only ever seen them in Tony Stark’s possession so perhaps he has not released it to the outside world.) Hopefully in its rotation on this monitor it does not rotate in 360°, as the regularness of the cube would make it difficult to understand where an internal anomaly might exist in the real thing. Hopefully the wireframe only wavers back and forth within a few degrees, and is oriented in roughly the same way an observer glancing at the real thing would see it in the housing, to allow for instant mapping of problem areas.

Warning

Just to the left of the 3D map is a data monitoring panel. Its top label blinks a red WARNING CRITICAL ENERGY LEVELS and a percentage readout. The panel also features a key whose colors match those of the map. (As it should.) Hopefully a microinteraction allows a user to touch any part of the map, freeze the rotation, and get the percentage details of the touched point. A detail box wavers its vertical position along the key to provide a user a quick assessment of its value, and also contains a percentage readout for precision. Judging by the position of the box and the readout, it looks like the 100% mark is about halfway up the screen. Hopefully the upper part of the scale is logarithmic to accommodate massive surges in values.

Additional elements of the display include several scrolling waveforms and text boxes with inscrutable data and labels. It’s easy to imagine these as useful (say total energy values for specific electromagnetic frequencies) but they’re difficult to read, so difficult to formally evaluate.

All told, a nice display (per some assumptions) for monitoring what’s happening with the cube.

Now if only they had applied that solid design thinking to that dais vs. cage problem.

Odyssey Controls

17 Mar 2015 by claytonbeese

Interior view of a spaceship cockpit with multiple control panels and screens, showing a dark space environment. Two seats are visible, with one pilot engaged in operating the controls.

The Odyssey is a large spaceship (larger than the NASA Space Shuttle) that is largely automated and capable of holding its crew in suspended animation. As the Odyssey gets closer to the unknown object (the TET), Jack and Vika wake up to take manual control of the ship.

Two crew members in a spacecraft cockpit, focused and engaged, with control panels in the background.

Jack and Vika—commander and co-pilot, respectively—sit in a standard command deck position close to the front of the ship. They have twin chairs, and mirror-image controls. This is an almost identical functional set up to the Space Shuttle’s command deck.

Interior view of a spacecraft cockpit featuring multiple control panels, screens displaying flight data, and pilot seats. — The cockpit for the *Endeavor*. Source: NASA

Several glass panels on the dash serve as moving displays of information, but a significant amount of the control space is given over to physical buttons and switches. NASA standard components make up a large number of these physical controls, including the numeric keypad and OMS (Orbital Maneuvering System) thrust stick.

A close-up of a hand gripping a control joystick in a spacecraft cockpit, with various buttons and displays visible in the background.

An interesting note here is just how sparse the Odyssey’s command deck is compared to NASA’s Endeavour (the complicated-looking picture above). Since the space shuttle is intended to be flown by human hands if necessary, it has controls for every action possible. (Minimizing modality and allowing the control to be optimized for the task.) In contrast, the Odyssey’s control setup is evidence that most functions on the ship are largely automated.

With most of the controls under automation, the only controls left would be those vital to manual flight operations, such as orbital maneuvers, and controls that activated pre-planned modes in the automated systems.

Close-up of hands operating a control panel with illuminated buttons.

Even in a critical and unplanned situation, e.g. uncontrolled descent towards the TET without communications back to Earth, Jack and Vika are efficient and confident with their motions. This implies excellent training on the equipment, a solidly laid-out control scheme, and proper differentiation of roles between Commander and Co-pilot.

The Odyssey is not a small feat of design, planning, and engineering.

A special mention should be made here for the ship’s interior airlock doors. The doors have large grab surfaces, easy-shut hinges, and a simple circular sealing mechanism. Jack is able to seal the door and confirm that the door is sealed simply by rotating the main handle. When the handle is in the proper place there is a visual and auditory confirmation of sealing. He is able to do this quickly and without error, just before the Odyssey is swallowed by the TET.

Focus on the workflow

The Odyssey does not reinvent spacecraft controls, it simply makes it easier for a two-person crew to control the ship while far away from any help. By focusing only on what Jack and Vika need in their command interface, and letting proven technology handle the rest, the Odyssey’s designers were able to strip away most of the complexity in the command deck but leave vital controls for the crew.

As we see at the very end of Oblivion, the effective design of the Odyssey’s control deck not only saved most of the Odyssey’s crew, but probably saved Humanity as well.

Healing chamber

30 Sep 2014 by Christopher Noessel

StarshipTroopers-tank-02

After Johnny was mistakenly reported as killed, the next time we see him he is in a healing chamber, submerged in green-underlit translucent fluid, resting on form-fitting clear plastic supports. He breathes through a tube, and a pair of small robot arms work busily to regenerate the damaged tissue in his leg.

StarshipTroopers-tank-01

The main reason to discuss this chamber on a blog about interfaces is the material choice of the outside of the chamber. By being surrounded completely in a transparent material (glass? plexiglass? transparent aluminum?), it means that physicians can keep an eye on progress, and he can have visual interactions with visitors, as we see when Dizzy and Ace visit to share with him his mistaken death certificate (and for Dizzy to leave him a kiss.) Additionally it gives Johnny something to look at during the long hours of recuperation.

I’m not sure why the green light is necessary. The scene implies that it could serve some part in the healing process, but if not, I wonder if an amber light might signal a more human, nurturing warmth to Johnny and visitors. Narratively, you’d want to avoid anything too yellow or run the risk of the audience’s first interpretations drifting too far to the Andres-Serrano-esque.

StarshipTroopers-tank-04_gold

KLENDATHU CASUALTIES: 308,563

25 Sep 2014 by Christopher Noessel

The initial invasion of Klendathu is disastrous, and our hero Rico suffers a massive penetration wound in combat, with an Arachnid digging its massive, thorn-like pincer straight through his thigh.

Rico is (spoiler alert) mistakenly reported as deceased. (There’s perhaps some argument for outfitting soldiers with networked biometrics so this sort of mistake can’t be made, but that’s another post.)

After returning to dock, Ibanez hears reports about the military disaster, and sees a death roll scrolling by on a large wall display. Three columns of off-white names tick along, surname first, with an initialism indicating whether the soldier was killed, wounded, or missing in action. At the very top three legends summarize key information, WOUNDED IN ACTION 2,548; KILLED IN ACTION 205,515; and MISSING IN ACTION 105,753. Largest of all is the KLENDATHU CASUALTIES: 308,563. (I know, the math doesn’t add up. It’s possible I misread the blurry numbers.) But the screen could use some more deliberate graphic design.

While surveying the display, she remarks that, “It’s strange, there’s almost no wounded at all.” Though that information is there for her, the typography is hard to read. If this is in fact something that the viewer is meant to understand from looking at the screen, some color coding would help this be seen at a glance. In the comp below, you’ll see wounded are colored yellow, and it’s immediately apparent how few there are in this one screen.

At the moment she approaches, the display is showing surnames that begin with “M”s. Ibanez approaches the display and types out Rico’s last name on the keyboard. The keys she touches indicates it’s a QWERTY layout.

After hitting one of three large keys on the right hand side, the text scrolls quickly to the “R” surnames, and a big, red, all-caps overlay tells her that RICO, JOHN D. was Killed In Action. The text is set against a black rectangle with a pale blue glow. There is an identifier MI34-95 and—if the KIA was not enough of a clue—it also says DECEASED.

After a moment, the text animates back into the list, with the black background, blue glow, and red text fading.

Though the presentation of this morbid information seems cold, it fits both the society and the fact that this is a military display, that has little time for emotional caretaking. Getting the information to the requester quickly and unambiguously—as this display does—fits the bill.

The HoverChair Social Network

14 Jan 2014 by claytonbeese

The other major benefit to the users of the chair (besides the ease of travel and lifestyle) is the total integration of the occupant’s virtual social life, personal life, fashion (or lack-thereof), and basic needs in one device. Passengers are seen talking with friends remotely, not-so-remotely, playing games, getting updated on news, and receiving basic status updates. The device also serves as a source of advertising (try blue! it’s the new red!).

A slight digression: What are the ads there for? Considering that the Axiom appears to be an all-inclusive permanent resort model, the ads could be an attempt to steer passengers to using resources that the ship knows it has a lot of. This would allow a reprieve for heavily used activities/supplies to be replenished for the next wave of guests, instead of an upsell maneuver to draw more money from them. We see no evidence of exchange of money or other economic activity while on-board the Axiom…

OK, back to the social network.

Security?

It isn’t obvious what the form of authentication is for the chairs. We know that the chairs have information about who the passenger prefers to talk to, what they like to eat, where they like to be aboard the ship, and what their hobbies are. With that much information, if there was no constant authentication, an unscrupulous passenger could easily hop in another person’s chair, “impersonate” them on their social network, and play havoc with their network. That’s not right.

It’s possible that the chair only works for the person using it, or only accesses the current passenger’s information from a central computer in the Axiom, but it’s never shown. What we do know is that the chair activates when a person is sitting on it and paying attention to the display, and that it deactivates as soon as that display is cut or the passenger leaves the chair.

We aren’t shown what happens when the passenger’s attention is drawn away from the screen, since they are constantly focused on it while the chair is functioning properly.

If it doesn’t already exist, the hologram should have an easy to push button or gesture that can dismiss the picture. This would allow the passenger to quickly interact with the environment when needed, then switch back to the social network afterwards.

And, for added security in case it doesn’t already exist, biometrics would be easy for the Axiom. Tracking the chair user’s voice, near-field chip, fingerprint on the control arm, or retina scan would provide strong security for what is a very personal activity and device. This system should also have strong protection on the back end to prevent personal information from getting out through the Axiom itself.

Social networks hold a lot of very personal information, and the network should have protections against the wrong person manipulating that data. Strong authentication can prevent both identity theft and social humiliation.

Taking the occupant’s complete attention

While the total immersion of social network and advertising seems dystopian to us (and that’s without mentioning the creepy way the chair removes a passenger’s need for most physical activity), the chair looks genuinely pleasing to its users.

They enjoy it.

But like a drug, their enjoyment comes at the detriment of almost everything else in their lives. There seem to be plenty of outlets on the ship for active people to participate in their favorite activities: Tennis courts, golf tees, pools, and large expanses for running or biking are available but unused by the passengers of the Axiom.

Work with the human need

In an ideal world a citizen is happy, has a mixture of leisure activities, and produces something of benefit to the civilization. In the case of this social network, the design has ignored every aspect of a person’s life except moment-to-moment happiness.

This has parallels in goal driven design, where distinct goals (BNL wants to keep people occupied on the ship, keep them focused on the network, and collect as much information as possible about what everyone is doing) direct the design of an interface. When goal-driven means data driven, then the data being collected instantly becomes the determining factor of whether a design will succeed or fail. The right data goals means the right design. Wrong data goals mean the wrong design.

Instead of just occupying a person’s attention, this interface could have instead been used to draw people out and introduce them to new activities at intervals driven by user testing and data. The Axiom has the information and power, perhaps even the responsibility, to direct people to activities that they might find interesting. Even though the person wouldn’t be looking at the screen constantly, it would still be a continuous element of their day. The social network could have been their assistant instead of their jailer.

One of the characters even exclaims that she “didn’t even know they had a pool!”. Indicating that she would have loved to try it, but the closed nature of the chair’s social network kept her from learning about it and enjoying it. By directing people to ‘test’ new experiences aboard the Axiom and releasing them from its grip occasionally, the social network could have acted as an assistant instead of an attention sink.

Moment-to-moment happiness might have declined, but overall happiness would have gone way up.

The best way for designers to affect the outcome of these situations is to help shape the business goals and metrics of a project. In a situation like this, after the project had launched a designer could step in and point out those moments were a passenger was pleasantly surprised, or clearly in need of something to do, and help build a business case around serving those needs.

The obvious moments of happiness (that this system solves for so well) could then be augmented by serendipitous moments of pleasure and reward-driven workouts.

We must build products for more than just fleeting pleasure

As soon as the Axiom lands back on Earth, the entire passenger complement leaves the ship (and the social network) behind.

It was such a superficial pleasure that people abandoned it without hesitation when they realized that there was something more rewarding to do. That’s a parallel that we can draw to many current products. The product can keep attention for now, but something better will come along and then their users will abandon them.

A company can produce a product or piece of software that fills a quick need and initially looks successful. But, that success falls apart as soon as people realize that they have larger and tougher problems that need solving.

Ideally, a team of designers at BNL would have watched after the initial launch and continued improving the social network. By helping people continue to grow and learn new skills, the social network could have kept the people aboard the Axiom it top condition both mentally and physically. By the time Wall-E came around, and life finally began to return to Earth, the passengers would have been ready to return and rebuild civilization on their own.

To the designers of a real Axiom Social Network: You have the chance to build a tool that can save the world.

We know you like blue! Now it looks great in Red!

Sci-fi interfaces

Stop watching sci-fi. Start using it.

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