The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition.
Today we’ll be covering Best Believable. These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid computer-human-interaction principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing.
The 2026 Award goes to: The Running Man
This second adaptation of Stephen King’s novel knocks it out of the park for the plot-central interfaces: The runner cuff and R-Cam box, the hideous sousveillance phone app for “fans”, the service design of the “free-v” show, and the in-home snitch interfaces. They lean towards narrative (missing a few things real-world counterparts would need), but all help articulate this dystopian world and the circumstances that drive the action. Moreover, I feel quite certain not making good real-world models of these horrible things is the right thing to do, especially given *gestures vaguely at the kakistocracy*.
On top of that it also has lots of awesome everyday interfaces, and it takes a level of commitment on the part of the filmmakers to go that deep in the worldbuilding. There’s a videophone interface with shades of Blade Runner. There’s a mailbox that signals its readiness and lifts off immediately after receiving a letter. (Though I would have flipped those red and green colors, so red meant “don’t put mail in here” and green meant “ready to receive”, but my invitation was lost in the mail.) The fare interfaces in the taxi. The self-driving interface of the citizen car. The piloting interfaces aboard the network plane. It’s all uncluttered, straightforward, and believable. Really well done, really well presented, and that’s hard to do in intense-action movies.
Also check out: War of the Worlds (2025)
It got universally panned. Fair enough, neither ubiquitous government surveillance nor the current DHS bears valorization. (Also the virus-but-its-digital twist was already done), but I am impressed that this take on the classic Wells story is told almost entirely through interfaces, and each of them is detailed and mostly-realistic. The editing around the interface can be dizzying, and I wondered why William Radford had to do so much digital hunting at the beginning when an assistant should have been guiding his attention. But it’s impressive to bring that tale to life mostly through this unsung medium.
Also check out: Companion
With soft echoes of the interfaces in Westworld (2016), the interfaces in Companion control android and gynoid companions. (Yes, that term is deliberately coy.) They are clean and simple, which underscores the robots’ horror that they are under that much control by their owners.
My hackles are raised from “Intelligence” being a single slider. Intelligence is much more complicated than that, and this notion that it’s a single scalar variable has done a lot of damage over time. Even if they’d had a little expando control, it would have pointed at the idea that we’re looking at a simplification. Also I wish they’d provided a live preview of the eye color, because even with its intended use—of an owner controlling their companion’s eye color—this control has them glancing up to see the effect and then back down again to adjust, which is not a satisfying feedback loop. I use this very control as an example of a “plan” assistant in my new book. Hey, all of Hollywood: Buy it!
The thanatorium is a speculative device for assisted suicide in Soylent Green. Suicide and death are not easy topics and I will do my best to address them 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.
There are four experiences to look at in the interface and service design of the Thanatorium: The patient, their beneficiaries, the usher to the beneficiaries, and the attendants to the patient. This post is about the interface for the usher. This Thanatorium personnel is there as a stage manager of sorts, both to help the patient and the beneficiaries go where they need to go, ensure the beneficiaries do not do what they must not, and run the tech aspects of the ceremony.
The usher, left, ushing.
Note that—as I backworlded in the last post—these notes presume that the reason the beneficiaries are separated from the patients are to prevent them from trying to stop the event, and to minimize distractions during the cinerama display for gross biochemical reasons. Also recall that we’re having to go with a best-guess as to what the usual experience is, since we only see Thorn’s tardy thuggery in the film.
The usher’s tasks
Based on what we see in the film, the usher has a lot to do for each event…
Receive the patient’s preferences (music category, color, whatever other questions intake asked before we join that scene) from the intake personnel
Escort the patient to the “theater” and the beneficiaries to the observation room
Set the color of the light and the music to the patient’s preferences
Close the portal for the hemlock drinking
Open the portal for last farewells
Close the portal for the cinerama display
Start the cinerama display
Get help if the patient gets up or otherwise interrupts the ceremony
Wait for when the patient dies
Open the portal to view the body’s being shuttled away
Ensure the beneficiaries behave, answer any questions
Escort the beneficiaries back to the lobby
The interface barely touches on any of this
With all that in mind, we can see that this interface is woefully ill-equipped for any of his tasks. In the prior post I argue that the features for speaking to the patient—the speaker, the audio jack, and the SPEAKING PERMITTED indicator—should be separated from the usher’s stage manager functions. So we’re only going to pay attention in this post to the row of backlit rocker toggles labeled PORTAL, EFFECTS, CHAMBER 2, AUDIO, VISUAL, CHAMBER 1 and a little bit of the authorization key that looks like a square metal button in the screen cap above. And note I’m going to make suggestions that are appropriate to the early 1970s rather than use either modern real-world or speculative interface technologies.
First, that authorization key is pretty cool
The fact that it’s a featureless, long metal cuboid is so simple it feels sci-fi. Even the fact that its slot is unlabeled is good—it would help prevent a malicious or grief-panicked user from figuring out how to take control. You could even go one step further and have a hidden magnetic switch, so there’s not even a slot to clue in users. Production designer note, though, this means that the panel needs to be wood (or something non-magnetic) rather than a ferromagnetic metal. Aluminum, maybe, since it’s paramagnetic, but you also don’t want anything that can scratch or wear easily and give away the position of the secret spot.
This is a cabinet lock, but the same principle would apply.
But, the buttons don’t match the scene
The PORTAL button never changes state, though we see the portal open and close in the scene. AUDIO is dim though we hear the audio. Maybe dim equals on? No, because VISUAL is lit. There’s some gymnastics we could do to apologize for this, but Imma give up and just say it’s just a moviemaking error.
And they are poorly clustered
Why is CHAMBER 2 before CHAMBER 1? Why are the three AV buttons split up by CHAMBER 2? A more reasonable chunking of these would be PORTAL on its own, CHAMBER 1 & CHAMBER 2 together, and the remaining A/V buttons together. These groups should be separated to make them easier to identify and help avoid accidental activation (though the stakes here are pretty low.)
If we were just dealing with these 6 buttons, this might be a reasonable clustering. But, read on…
The PORTAL button is the wrong type and orientation
Look close at the screen shot and you’ll see that each button consists of three parts. A white, back-lit square which bears the label, and two black pushbuttons that act like rocker switches. That is, press the upper one in, and the lower one pops out. Press that popped-out lower one in, and the upper one pops out again. When the lower button is pressed in, the button is “on,” which you can tell because those are the only ones with the upper button popped out and the back light illuminated.
Rocker switches are good for things with two mutually exclusive states, like ON and OFF. The PORTAL button is the only one for which this makes unambiguous sense, with its two states being OPEN and CLOSED. But, we have to note that it is poorly mapped. The button has a vertical orientation, but the portal closes from right to left. It means the usher has to memorize which toggle state is open and which one is closed. It would more usable to have an inferrable affordance. Cheapest would be to turn the button sideways so it maps more clearly, but an even tighter mapping would be a slider mounted sideways with OPEN and CLOSED labels. I don’t think the backlit status indicator is necessary here because there’s already a giant signal of the state of the portal, and that’s the adjacent portal.
What do EFFECTS and CHAMBER even do?
What does the EFFECTS button do? I mean, if AUDIO and VISUAL have their own controls, what’s left? Lasers? A smoke machine? Happiness pheromones? (I’m getting The Cabin in the Woods vibes here.) Whatever it is, if there are multiple, they should have individual controls, in case the patient wants one but not the other, or if there’s any variability that needs controlling.
Also what do CHAMBER 1 and CHAMBER 2 do? It’s very poor labeling. What chambers do they refer to? Maybe the observation room is chamber 1 and the theater is chamber 2? If so, different names could save the usher’s having to memorize them. Also, what do these switches control? Lights? Door locks? We would need to know to really make design recommendations for these.
The AV controls are incomplete
Which takes us to AUDIO, and VISUAL. Each of these is missing something.
Sure, they might need ON/OFF controls as we see here. But how about a volume control to accommodate the hard-of-hearing and the sound-sensitive? How about a brightness control for the video? These could have an OFF state and replace the toggle switches.
We know from the movie itself that the service has offered Sol his choice of music genre. Where is the genre selector? This is a non-trivial problem since the number of genres is on the order of 1000. They probably don’t offer all of them, but at intake they do ask Sol his preference as an open-ended question, so it implies a huge selection. Radio band selectors would have made sense to audiences in the 1970s, and signal a huge number of options, but risk being “out of tune” and imply that it’s broadcast. So either have a small number of options with a 15° rotary switch (and rewrite the intake scene so Sol selects from a menu) or three 10-digit rotary switches with a “commit” momentary button, and have a small reference booklet hanging there.
I also want to believe that the theme of the video can be selected. Sol has chosen “nature” but you could imagine patients requesting for their end-of-life ceremony something else like “family,” “celestial,” “food” (given the diegesis, this should be first) or even “religious” (with a different one for each of the world’s twelve major religions). So it would make sense to have a video theme selector as well, say, on the order of 20 options. That could be a 15° rotary switch. Labeling gets tough, but it could just be numbers with an index label to the side.
I’m going to presume that they never need scrubbing controls (REWIND or FAST FORWARD) for the AV. The cinerama plays through once and stops. Sudden rewinding or fast forwarding would be jarring for the patient and ruin the immersion. Have a play button that remains depressed while the cinerama is ongoing. But if the patient passes more quickly than expected, a RESET button would make sense. So would a clock or a countdown timer, since Sol had confirmed at intake that it would be at least 20 minutes, and to let the usher know how much time they have left to get those neurotransmitter numbers up up up.
Some controls are straight up missing
How does an usher set the lights according to the patient’s preferences? They ask at intake, and we see Sol’s face washed with a soothing amber color once the attendants leave, so there should be a color selector. Three RGB slide potentiometers would provide perfect control, but I doubt anyone would quibble that the green they’d asked for was #009440 and not #96b300, so you could go with a selector. The XKCD color survey results show that there are on the order of about 30 colors, so something similar to the video-theme selector above would work, with a brightness potentiometer to the side.
The patient experience is a bit of a show, so to signal its beginning and end, there should be lighting controls for the usher to dim and raise the lights, like in a theater. So let’s add those.
Also, the usher has a minor medical task to accomplish: Monitoring the health of the patient to know when they’ve passed. The three metrics for clinical death are a cessation of all three of…
breath
blood flow
brain activity
…so there should be indicators for each of these. As discussed in the medical chapter of the book, this is ideally a display of values over time, but in the resource-poor and elecromechanical world of Soylent Green, it might have to be a collection of gauges, with an indicator bulb near the zero for when activity has stopped. A final, larger indicator bulb should light when all three gauges are still. To really underscore the morbidness of this interface, all those indicators should be green.
If you buy my backworlding, i.e. that part of the point of preventing interruptions is to maximize the dopamine and serotonin being released into the patient’s body, there should also be status indicators showing the level of these neurotransmitters in the patient’s bloodstream. They can be the same style of gauges, but I’d add a hand drawn arrow to some point along the chapter ring that reads “quota.” Those indicators should be larger than the clinical death indicators to match their importance to Soylent’s purposes.
Lastly, thinking of Thorn’s attack, the usher should have a panic button to summon help if the patient or the beneficiaries are getting violent (especially once they discover they’re locked in.) This should be hidden under the panel so it can be depressed secretly.
Where should this panel go?
As described in the beneficiaries post we’re going to leave the communication interface just below the portal, where they are now for those fleeting moments when they can wish the patient goodbye.
And there’s no need to put the usher’s controls under the nose of the beneficiaries. (In fact with the medical monitoring it would be kind of cruel.) So let the usher have a lectern beside the door, in a dim pool of light, and mount the controls to the reading top. (Also give them a stool to rest on, have we learned nothing?) Turn the lectern such that the interface is not visible to beneficiaries in the room. This lets the usher remain respectfully out of the center of attention, but in a place where they can keep an eye on both the patient when the portal is open, and the beneficiaries throughout.
Looks cheap? Perfect.
In total, the lectern panel would look something like this…
The Usher escorts Thorn into the room. Thorn rushes to the portal. The usher steps behind a lectern near the door.
Usher
It’s truly a shame you missed the overture.
The Usher slides a switch on the lectern panel, and the portal closes.
Thorn
I want to see him.
Usher, looking down at his interface
That is prohibited during the ceremony.
Worm’s eye view. Thorn takes a few steps toward him and knocks the lectern to the ground. It falls with its interface in the foreground. In the background, we see Thorn slam the usher against the wall.
Thorn
Well I can assure you, open that damned thing right now, or I swear to God you’ll die before he does!
Usher
OK, OK!
The usher falls to his hands and knees and we see him slide the switch to open the portal. Thorn steps back to it, and the usher gets on his feet to right the lectern
There is one last interface in The Faithful Wookiee we see in use. It’s one of those small interfaces, barely seen, but that invites lots of consideration. In the story, Boba and Chewie have returned to the Falcon and administered to Luke and Han the cure to the talisman virus. Relieved, Luke (who assigns loyalty like a puppy at a preschool) says,
“Boba, you’re a hero and a faithful friend.[He isn’t. —Editor]You must come back with us. [He won’t.] What’s the matter with R2?”
C3PO says,“I’m afraid sir, it’s because you said Boba is a faithful friend and faithful ally.[He didn’t.]That simply does not feed properly into R2’s information banks.”
Luke asks, “What are you talking about?”
“We intercepted a message between Boba and Darth Vader, sir. Boba Fett is Darth Vader’s right-hand man. I’m afraid this whole adventure has been an Imperial plot.”
Luke did not see this coming.
Luke gapes towards Boba, who has his blaster drawn and is backing up into an alcove with an escape hatch. Boba glances at a box on the wall, slides some control sideways, and a hatch opens in the ceiling. He says, deadpan, “We’ll meet again…friend,” before touching some control on his belt that sends him flying into the clear green sky, leaving behind a trail of smoke.
A failure of door
Let’s all keep in mind that the Falcon isn’t a boat or a car. It is a spaceship. On the other side of the hatch could be breathable air at the same pressure as what’s inside the ship, or it could also be…
The bone-cracking 2.7° Kelvin emptiness of space
The physics-defying vortex of hyperspace
Some poisonous atmosphere like Venus’, complete with sulfuric acid clouds
A hungry flock of neebrays.
There should be no easy way to open any of its external doors.
Think of an airplane hatch. On the other side of that thing is an atmosphere known to support human life, and it sure as hell doesn’t open like a gen-1 iPhone. For safety, it should take some doing.
If we’re being generous, maybe there’s some mode by which each door can be marked as “safe” and thereby made this easy to open. But that raises issues of security and authorizations and workflow that probably aren’t worth going into without a full redesign and inserting some new technological concepts into the diegesis.
Let’s also not forget that to secure that most precious of human biological needs, i.e. air, there should be an airlock, where the outer door and inner door can’t be opened at the same time without extensive override. But that’s not a hindrance. It could have made for an awesome moment.
LUKE gapes at Boba. Cut to HAN.
HAN
You won’t get any information out of us, alive or dead. Even the droids are programmed to self-destruct. But there’s a way out for you.
HAN lowers his hand to a panel, and presses a few buttons. An escape hatch opens behind Boba Fett.
BOBA FETT
We’ll meet again…friend.
That quick change might have helped explain why Boba didn’t just kill everyone and steal the Falcon and the droids (along with their information banks) then and there.
Security is often sacrificed to keep narrative flowing, so I get why makers are tempted to bypass these issues. But it’s also worth mentioning two other failures that this 58-second scene illustrates.
A failure to droid
Why the hell did C3PO and R2D2 wait to tell Luke and Han of this betrayal until Luke happened to say something that didn’t fit into “information banks?” C3PO could have made up some bullshit excuse to pull Luke aside and whisper the news. But no, he waits, maybe letting Luke and Han spill vital information about the Rebellion, and only when something doesn’t compute, blurt out that the only guy in the room with the blaster happens to be in bed with Space Voldemort.
I can’t apologize for this. It’s a failure of writing and an unimaginative mental model. If you are a writer wondering how droids would behave, think of them less as stoic gurus and more as active academies.
A failure of plot
Worse, given that C3PO says this is all an Imperial plot, we’re meant to understand that in an attempt to discover the Rebel base, the Empire…
Successfully routed rumors of a mystical talisman, which the Empire was just about to find, to the Rebels in a way they would trust it
Actually created a talisman
Were right on their long shot bet that the Rebels would bite at the lure
Bioengineered a virus that
Caused a sleeping sickness that only affects humans
Survived on the talisman indefinitely
Somehow protected Boba Fett from the virus even though he is human
Planted a cure for the virus on a planet near to where Han and Chewie would find the talisman
Successfully routed the location of the cure to Chewbacca so he would know where to go
Got Boba Fett—riding an ichthyodont—within minutes, to the exact site on the planet where Chewie would crash-land the Falcon.
Because without any of these points, the plan would not have worked. Yet despite the massive logistics, technological, and scientific effort, this same Empire had to be stupid enough to…
Bother to interrupt the mission in progress to say that the mission was on track
Use insecure, unencrypted, public channels to for this report
Also note that despite all this effort (and buffoonery) they never, ever used this insanely effective bioweapon against the Rebels, again.
I know, you’re probably thinking this is just some kid’s cartoon in the Star Wars diegesis, but that only raises more problems, which I’ll address in the final post on this crazy movie within a crazy movie.
When Imperial troopers intrude to search the house, one of the bullying officers takes interest in a device sitting on the dining table. It’s the size of a sewing machine, with a long handle along the top. It has a set of thumb toggles along the top, like old cassette tape recorder buttons.
Saun convinces the officer to sit down, stretches the thin script with a bunch of pointless fiddling of a volume slider and pantomimed delays, and at last fumbles the front of the device open. Hinged at the bottom like a drawbridge, it exposes a small black velvet display space. Understandably exasperated, the officer stands up to shout, “Will you get on with it?” Saun presses a button on the opened panel, and the searing chord of an electric guitar can be heard at once.
Inside the drawbridge-space a spot of pink light begins to glow, and mesmerized officer who, moments ago was bent on brute intimidation, but now spends the next five minutes and 23 seconds grinning dopily at the volumetric performance by Jefferson Starship.
During the performance, 6 lights link in a pattern in the upper right hand corner of the display. When the song finishes, the device goes silent. No other interactions are seen with it.
Many questions. Why is there a whole set of buttons to open the thing? Is this the only thing it can play? If not, how do you select another performance?Is it those unused buttons on the top? Why are the buttons unlabeled? Is Jefferson Starship immortal? How is it that they have only aged in the long, long time since this was recorded? Or was this volumetric recording somehow sent back in time? Where is the button that Saun pressed to start the playback? If there was no button, and it was the entire front panel, why doesn’t it turn on and off while the officer taps (see above)? What do the little lights do other than distract? Why is the glow pink rather than Star-Wars-standard blue? Since volumetric projections are most often free-floating, why does this appear in a lunchbox? Since there already exists ubiquitous display screens, why would anyone haul this thing around? How does this officer keep his job?
Perhaps it’s best that these questions remain unanswered. For if anything were substantially different, we would risk losing this image, of the silhouette of the lead singer and his microphone. Humanity would be the poorer for it.
One other portable device that bears mention is Lt. Farmans microfiche reader.
Farman checks Morbius’ information.
When the officers originally learn Morbius’ name, Farman fetches the device from a drawer. It is a small, metallic square box about the size of a pack of playing cards. He withdraws one of a set of thin transparent sheets of microfiche held in a pocket on the back, and inserts it to a slot at the top of the device. The device magnifies the contents of the sheet for the viewer, who can scroll by pulling the microfiche up and down. The particular microfiche displays all of the manifest information from the Bellerophon expedition, which Farman uses to verify Morbius information.
Farman looks for Julia Marsin on the Bellerephon’s manifest.
Farman uses an even smaller version of this device in the field, which consists of a small, lipstick-sized cylinder with a slit, through which he passes the same film to check for a “Mrs. Morbius.”
Though this seems like miniaturization that is far ahead of its time, microforms and optical magnification had been around and used to compactly store data since the mid 1800s. This device is an extension of these optical concepts, rather than modern digital media which only reached similar portable sizes in the early 2000s.
All telecommunications in the film are based on either a public address or a two-way radio metaphor.
Commander Adams addresses the crew.
To address the crew from inside the ship, Commander Adams grabs the microphone from its holder on the wall. Its long handle makes it easy to grab. By speaking into the lit, transparent circle mounted to one end, his voice is automatically broadcast across the ship.
Commander Adams lets Chief Quinn know he’s in command of the ship.
Quinn listens for incoming signals.
The two-way radio on his belt is routed through the communications officer back at the ship. To use it, he unclips the small cylindrical microphone from its clip, flips a small switch at the base of the box, and pulls the microphone on its tether close to his mouth to speak. When the device is active, a small array of lights on the box illuminates.
Confirming their safety by camera, Chief Quinn gets an eyeful of Alta.
The microphone also has a video camera within it. When Chief Quinn asks Commander Adams to activate the viewer, he does so by turning the device such that its small end faces outwards, at which time it acts as a camera, sending a video signal back to the ship, to be viewed on the view plate.
The Viewplate is used frequently to see outside the ship.
Altair IV looms within view.
The Viewplate is a large video screen with rounded edges that is mounted to a wall off the bridge. To the left of it three analog gauges are arranged in a column, above two lights and a stack of sliders. These are not used during the film.
Commander Adams engages the Viewplate to look for Altair IV.
The Viewplate is controlled by a wall mounted panel with a very curious placement. When Commander Adams rushes to adjust it, he steps to the panel and adjusts a few horizontal sliders, while craning around a cowling station to see if his tweaks are having the desired effect. When he’s fairly sure it’s correct, he has to step away from the panel to get a better view and make sure. There is no excuse for this poor placement.
