As Joe wanders through the (incredibly depressing) lobby of St. God’s Memorial Hospital, it is at once familiar but wrong. One of these wrong things is a floor cleaning robot labeled The FloorMaster. It loudly announces “YOUR FLOOR IS NOW CLEAN!” while bumping over and over into a toe kick under a cabinet. (It also displays this same phrase on a display panel.) The floor immediately below its path is, in fact, spotless, but the surrounding floor is so filthy it is opaque with dirt, as well as littered with syringes and trash lined with unsettling stains.
There are few bananas for scale, but I’m guessing it’s half meter square. It has a yellow top with green sides and highlights. It has bumpers and some greebles and an amber display screen on top. “The FloorMaster” logo is printed on its side.
Narratively awesome
The wonderful thing about this device is it quickly tells us many things at once. First, the FloorMaster is a technology that is, itself, kind of stupid. Today’s Roombas “know” to turn a bit when they bump into a wall. It’s one of the basic ways they avoid this very scenario. So this illustrates that the technology in this world is, itself, kind of stupid. (How society managed to make it this far without imploding or hell, exploding, is a mystery.)
It also shows that the people around the machines are failing to notice and do anything about the robot. They are either too dull to notice or this is just so common that it’s not worth doing anything about.
It also shows how stupid capitalism has become (it’s a running theme of St. God’s and the rest of the movie). It calls itself the floor master, but in no way has it mastered your floors. In no way are your floors clean, despite what the device itself is telling and blinking at you. And CamelCase brand names are so 1990s, much less 2505.
Realistically stupid
So, I wrote this whole book about agents, i.e. technologies that persistently respond to triggers with behaviors that serve people. It’s called Designing Agentive Technologies: AI That Works for People. One of my recurring examples in that book and when I speak publicly about that content is the Roomba, so I have a bookload of opinions on how this thing should be designed. I don’t want to simply copy+paste that book here. But know that Chapter 9 is all about handoff and takeback between an agent and a user, and ideally this machine would be smart enough to detect when it is stuck and reach out to the user to help.
I would be remiss not to note that, as with the The Fifth Elementfloor sweeping robots, safety of people around the underfoot robot is important. This is especially true in a hospital setting, where people may be in a fragile state and not as alert as they would ordinarily be. So unless this was programmed to run only when there was no one around, it seems like a stupid thing to have in a hospital. OK, chalk another point up to its narrative virtues.
Fighting US Idiocracy
Speaking of bots, there is a brilliant bot that you can sign up for to help us resist American idiocracy. It’s the resistbot, and you can find it on Facebook messenger, twitter, and telegram. It provides easy ways to find out who represents you in Congress, and deliver messages to them in under 2 minutes. It’s not as influential as an in-person visit or call, but as part of your arsenal, it helps with reminders for action. Join!
Joe and Rita climb into the pods and situate themselves comfortably. Officer Collins and his assistant approach and insert some necessary intravenous chemicals. We see two canisters, one empty (for waste?) and one filled with the IV fluid. To each side of the subject’s head is a small raised panel with two lights (amber and ruby) and a blue toggle switch. None of these are labeled. The subjects fall into hibernation and the lids close.
Collins and his assistant remove a cable labeled “MASTER” from the interface and close a panel which seals the inputs and outputs. They then close a large steel door, stenciled “TOP SECRET,” to the hibernation chamber.
The external interface panel includes:
A red LED display
3 red safety cover toggle switches labeled “SET 1” “SET 2” and “SET 3.”
A 5×4 keypad
0-9 numbers
Letters A–F
Four unlabeled white buttons
500 years later, after the top secret lab is destroyed, the pods become part of the mountains of garbage that just pile up. Sliding down an avalanche of the stuff, the pods wind up in a downtown area. Joe’s crashes through Frito’s window. At this moment the pod decides enough is enough and it wakes him. Clamps around the edge unlock. The panel cover has fallen off somewhere, and the LED display blinks the text, “unfreezing.” Joe drowsily pushes the lids open and gets out.
Its purpose in the narrative
This is a “segue” interface, mostly useful in explaining how Joe and Rita are transported safely 500 years in the future. At its base, all it needs to convey is:
Scienciness (lights and interfaces, check)
See them pass into sleep (check)
See why how they are kept safe (rugged construction details, clamped lid, check)
See the machine wake them up (check)
Is it ideal?
The ergonomics are nice. A comfortable enough coffin to sleep in. And it seems…uh…well engineered, seeing as how it winds up lasting 500 times its intended use and takes some pretty massive abuse as it slides down the mountains of garbage and through Frito’s window into his apartment. But that’s where the goodness ends. It looks solid enough to last a long long time. But there are questions.
From Collins’ point of view:
Why was it engineered to last 500 years, but you know, fail to have any of its interior lights or toggle switches labeled? Or have something more informative on the toggles than “SET 1”?
How on earth did they monitor the health of the participants over time? (Compare Prometheus’ hibernation screens.) Did they just expect it to work perfectly? Not a lot of comfort to the subjects. Did they monitor it remotely? Why didn’t that monitoring screen arouse the suspicions of the foreclosers?
How are subjects roused? If the procedure is something that Collins just knows, what if something happens to him? That information should be somewhere on the pod with very clear instructions.
How does it gracefully degrade as it runs out of resources (power, water, nutrition, air, water storage or disposal) to keep it’s occupants alive? What if the appointed person doesn’t answer the initial cry for help?
From the hibernators’ point of view:
How do the participants indicate their consent to go into hibernation? Can this be used as an involuntary prison?
How do they indicate consent to be awakened? (Not an easy problem, but Passengers illustrates why it’s necessary.)
What if they wake early? How do they get out or let anyone know to release them?
Why does the subject have to push the lid if they’re going to be weak and woozy when they waken? Can’t it be automatic, like the hibernation lids in Aliens?
How does the sleeper know it’s safe to get out? Certainly Joe and Rita expected to wake up in the military laboratory. But while we’re putting in the effort to engineer it to last 500 years, maybe we could account for the possibility that it’s somewhere else.
Can’t you put me at ease in the disorientating hypnopompic phase? Maybe some soothing graphic on the interior lid? A big red label reading, “DON’T PANIC” with an explanation?
Can you provide some information to help orient me, like where I am and when I am? Why does Joe have to infer the date from a magazine cover?
From a person-in-the-future point of view
How do the people nearby know that it contains living humans? That might be important for safekeeping, or even to take care in case the hibernators are carrying some disease to which the population has lost resistance.
How do we know if they’ve got some medical conditions that will need specialized care? What food they eat? Whether they are dangerous?
Can we get a little warning so we can prepare for all this stuff?
Is the interface believable?
Oh yes. Prototypes tend to be minimum viable thing, and usability lags far behind basic utility. Plus, this is military, known to be tough people expecting their people to be tough people without the need for civilian niceties. Plus, Collins didn’t seem too big on “details.” So very believable.
Note that this doesn’t equate to the thing itself being believable. I mean, it was an experiment meant to last only a year. How did it have the life support resources—including power—to run for 500 times the intended duration? What brown fluid has the 273,750,000 calories needed to sustain Luke Wilson’s physique for 500 years? (Maya Rudoph lucks out needing “only” 219,000,000.) How did it keep them alive and prevent long-term bedridden problems, like pressure sores, pneumonia, constipation, contractures, etc. etc.? See? Comedy is hard to review.
Fight US Idiocracy: Donate to close races
Reminder: Every post in this series includes some U.S.-focused calls to action for readers to help reverse the current free fall into our own Idiocracy. In the last post I provided information about how to register to vote in your state. DO THAT. If you accidentally missed the deadline (and triple check because many states have some way to register right up to and including election day, which is 06 NOV this year), there are still things you can do. Sadly, one of the most powerful things feels crass: Donate money to close campaigns. Much of this money is spent reaching out to undecided voters via media channels, and that means the more money the more reach.
There are currently 68 highly competitive seats—those considered a toss up between the two parties or leaning slightly toward one. You can look at the close campaigns and donate directly, or you can donate to Act Blue, and let that organization make the call. That’s what I did. Just now. Please join me.
While reviewing fascism in sci-fi, I was reminded of how much I love Mike Judge’s under-appreciated film Idiocracy. It’s hilarious, smart, and, admittedly, mean sci-fi. Since American politics are heading to some unholy Deep Dream merger of this film and The Handmaid’s Tale, I’m refining my broad dictum against sci-fi comedy and diving in.
Release Date: 25 January 2007 (USA)
Overview
Private Joe Bauers and jaded sex worker Rita are selected by a military program—for their being very, very average—to be frozen in capsules for a year.
A mistake shuts down the monitoring agency, and they wind up frozen for 500 years instead. Over that time, because dumb people keep having more kids than smart people, the average intelligence of the population drops and drops, so that when Joe and Rita wake from the stasis pods on 03 March 2505, they are the smartest people in the world. By a lot. Society is barely hanging on, lasting as long as it has owing to the designs of some long-dead smart people.
Woozy from his long sleep, Joe wanders into a hospital where the doctor goes into a panic for Joe’s not having an ID tattoo on his wrist. For this crime Joe is arrested, tried in a sham court, tattooed, and has his IQ tested before being bussed to prison. There Joe finally realizes how stupid everyone is when he talks his way to the exit and then just…runs away.
He finds his way back to the apartment of his court-appointed lawyer whose name is Frito. Joe asks if there are any time machines, and Frito says yes, there is one. But he’s hesitant. To motive him, Joe offers a compound interest time travel gambit payout of $80 billion and Frito—who says that he likes money—agrees. They find Rita (who, clearly used to dealing with morons, is faring pretty well) and head for the time machine, but Joe’s tattoo is remotely scanned and Frito’s car is shut down automatically for harboring fugitives. The three of them abandon the car to hike. They enter a truly massive CostCo to find the time machine, but Joe’s tattoo is again scanned and he is again arrested.
This time he’s taken to the White House, where he meets President King Camacho and named Secretary of the Interior for being the smartest man in the world, according to the IQ test he took earlier. In an impassioned speech to the House of Representin’ [sic], Camacho promises them that Joe will solve the problems of failing crops, the plague of dust storms, the failing “ecomony,” acne, and car sickness; and do it all within one week. If he does accomplish it, Camacho promises, Joe will get a presidential pardon for his crimes. If not, he’ll be thrown back in jail.
Joe heads to the countryside with the Cabinet and Frito, where he is reunited with Rita. There he learns that the crops are being fed not with water but with a sports drink called Brawndo, The Thirst Mutilator™. (Brawndo’s computers had long ago identified water as a threat to its profit margins, and during the budget crisis of 2330, purchased the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission. This enabled them to say, do, and sell anything they wanted, including requiring all crops be fed with Brawndo.)
Joe recommends they switch from Brawndo to water for the crops, which grosses everyone out because they only associate water with the toilet. Unable to convince them with reason (in my favorite scene they parrot Brawndo advertising slogans as counter evidence, “It’s got what plants crave.” “It’s got electrolytes.”) he tells them he can talk to plants, and that the plants say they want water. This convinces the Cabinet, and the sprinklers are switched over.
This causes Brawndo’s stock price to crash, and the company’s computer “does that auto-layoff thing,” firing everyone at Brawndo and causing 50% unemployment across the country. Outside the White House, a jobless mob demands revenge. Joe is taken to court again and convicted. Joe is sentenced to one night of “rehabilitation,” which is a deadly, monster truck public execution.
As Rehab starts, Rita spots a flower growing outside the White House. She and Frito rush to Rehab to save him. On route, they see sprouts in fields. Camacho saves Joe from Rehabilitation just in time as Rita and Frito broadcast video of the sprouts, exonerating Joe to the world.
Pardoned, Joe and Rita have Frito take them to the time machine, which ends up being just a dumb theme ride in the CostCo. Joe and Rita resign themselves to their new life amongst the morons. They wed, and Joe is elected President of America with Rita as first lady and Frito as Vice President. The movie ends contrasting Rita and Joe’s three kids, “the three smartest kids in the world”, with Frito’s, who are “32 of the dumbest kids ever to walk the earth.”
It’s no accident that I’m writing about Idiocracy before the midterm elections in the U.S. The American Experiment seems to be on the verge, and close to some inescapable mistakes. So, at the end of each one of these posts, since this is my country, I’m going to go full USA-centric here and share something that USAmericans can do to vote, help others vote, and reverse our own continued freefall into Idiocracy. I know I have an international readership, but please bear with me.
Today, the bonus track is about registering to vote. If you’ve done it, awesome. Find someone in your life you can convince to register. If you haven’t, you need to. Either way, below is the info you need.
Register-to-vote deadlines
Voting is the most important tool we have, but in every state but North Dakota, to do that you have to be registered ahead of time. (Seriously. Good show, North Dakota.) These deadlines are all in October. You can see your state’s deadline (and for states that allow it, a link to register online) listed alphabetically at the New York Times link below.
You may be wondering it too late for you? Note that while most states have a single deadline for voter registration, many have separate deadlines for registering by mail, online, and in-person. Find the same information from the NYT site sorted by date below. If it is, damn, that sucks, but there is still more you can do. Stay tuned to this blog for more reviews, more bonus tracks, and more calls to action.
Registration by date
07 OCT Alaska, Montana (in person), Rhode Island
08 OCT Mississippi (in person), Washington (by mail and online)
09 OCT Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana (by mail and in person), Michigan, Mississippi (by mail), Nevada (by mail), New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah (by mail)
10 OCT Missouri, Montana (by mail)
12 OCT Idaho, New York (online and in person), North Carolina (by mail), Oklahoma
13 OCT Delaware
15 OCT Virginia
16 OCT District of Columbia, Kansas, Louisiana (online), Maine, Massachusetts (by mail), Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon (note when you renew your driver’s license your are automatically registered to vote), West Virginia
17 OCT Maryland, Massachusetts (online or in person), Nevada (by mail), New York (by mail), South Carolina, Wisconsin (by mail and online)
18 OCT Nevada (online)
19 OCT Nebraska (by mail and online)
22 OCT Alabama, California, Iowa (by mail), South Dakota, Wyoming (by mail)
26 OCT Nebraska (in person)
27 OCT Iowa (in person), New Hampshire (by mail)
29 OCT Colorado, Washington (in person)
30 OCT Connecticut, Utah (online and in person)
03 NOV North Carolina (in person)
TUE 06 NOV 2018, ELECTION DAY: Florida (in person), Iowa (in person), Maine (in person), Minnesota (in person), New Hampshire (in person), Vermont, Wisconsin (in person), Wyoming (in person). In California you can show up the day of and cast a provisional ballot.
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.
The Hover Chair is a ubiquitous, utilitarian, all-purpose assisting device. Each passenger aboard the Axiom has one. It is a mix of a beach-side deck chair, fashion accessory, and central connective device for the passenger’s social life. It hovers about knee height above the deck, providing a low surface to climb into, and a stable platform for travel, which the chair does a lot of.
A Universal Wheelchair
We see that these chairs are used by everyone by the time that Wall-E arrives on the Axiom. From BNL’s advertising though, this does not appear to be the original. One of the billboards on Earth advertising the Axiom-class ships shows an elderly family member using the chair, allowing them to interact with the rest of the family on the ship without issue. In other scenes, the chairs are used by a small number of people relaxing around other more active passengers.
At some point between the initial advertising campaign and the current day, use went from the elderly and physically challenged, to a device used 24/7 by all humans on-board the Axiom. This extends all the way down to the youngest children seen in the nursery, though they are given modified versions to more suited to their age and disposition. BNL shows here that their technology is excellent at providing comfort as an easy choice, but that it is extremely difficult to undo that choice and regain personal control.
But not a perfect interaction
We see failure from the passengers’ total reliance on the chairs when one of them (John) falls out of his chair trying to hand an empty drink cup to Wall-E. The chair shuts down, and John loses his entire connection to the ship. Because of his reliance on the chair, he’s not even able to pull himself back up and desperately reaches for the kiosk-bots for assistance.
This reveals the main flaw of the chair: Buy-N-Large’s model of distinct and complete specialization in robot roles has left the chair unable to help its passenger after the passenger leaves the chair’s seat. The first responders—the kiosk bots—can’t assist either (though this is due to programming, not capability…we see them use stasis/tractor beams in another part of the ship). Who or what robot the kiosk-bots are waiting for is never revealed, but we assume that there is some kind of specialized medical assistance robot specifically designed to help passengers who have fallen out of their chairs.
If these chairs were initially designed for infirm passengers, this would make sense; but the unintended conscription of the chair technology by the rest of the passengers was unforeseen by its original designers. Since BNL focused on specialization and fixed purpose, the ship was unable to change its programming to assist the less disabled members of the population without invoking the rest of the chair’s emergency workflow.
John reaching for help from the Kiosk-bots makes it appear that he either has seen the kiosk-bot use its beams before (so he knows it has the capability to help, if not the desire), or he pays so little attention to the technology that he assumes that any piece of the ship should be able to assist with anything he needs.
Whether he’s tech literate or tech insensitive and just wants things to work like magic as they do on the rest of the ship. The system is failing him and his mental model of the Axiom.
Make it ergonomic in every situation
Considering that the chairs already hover, and we know Buy-N-Large can integrate active tractor beams in robot design, it would have been better to have a chair variant that allowed the passenger to be in a standing position inside the chair while it moved throughout the ship. It would then look like a chariot or a full-body exo-skeleton.
This would allow people who may not be able to stand (either due to disability or medical condition) to still participate in active sports like tennis or holo-golf. It would also allow more maneuverability in the chair, allowing it to easily rotate to pick up a fallen passenger and reposition them in a more comfortable spot, even if they needed medical attention.
This would allow immobilization in the case of a serious accident, giving the medical-bot more time to arrive and preventing the passenger from injuring themselves attempting to rescue themselves.
The chair has been designed to be as appealing to a low-activity user as possible. But when technology exists, and is shown to be relatively ubiquitous across different robot types, it should be integrated at the front line where people will need it. Waiting for a medical bot when the situation doesn’t demand a medical response is overly tedious and painful for the user. By using technology already seen in wide use, the chair could be improved to assist people in living an active lifestyle even in the face of physical disabilities.
For our purposes, Dome City is a service. Provided by the city’s ancestors to provide a “good life” for their cloned descendants in a sustainable way, i.e., a way that does not risk the problems of overpopulation. The “good life” in this case is a particular hedonistic vision full of fashion, time at the spa, and easy casual sex.
There’s an ethical, philosophical, and anthropological question on whether this is the “right” sort of life one would want to structure a service around. I suspect it’s a good conversation that will last at least a few beers. Fascinating as that question may be, looking into the interaction design requires us to accept those as a given and see how well the touchpoints help these personas address their goal in this framework.
Sci: F (0 of 4) How believable are the interfaces?
The Fade Out drug is the only, only interface that’s perfectly believable. And while I can make up some reasons the Clean Up Rig is cool, that’s clearly what I’m bringing to it, and the rest of the bunch, to an interface, has massive problems with fundamental believability and usability. Seriously, the movie is a study in bad design.
Fi: A (4 of 4)
How well do the interfaces inform the narrative of the story?
Here the interfaces are fine. The Lifeclock tells us of their forced life limit. The Circuit tells us of the easy sex. Fade Out tells of easy inebriation. New You of easy physical changes.
The interfaces help tell the story of this bizarre dystopia, help paint the “vast, silly spectacle” that Roger Ebert criticized when he write his original review in 1976.
Other interfaces help move the plot along in effective, if sometimes ham-handed ways, like the SandPhone and Aesculator Mark III. So even when they’re background tech, they help. Full marks.
Interfaces: D (1 of 4) How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals?
Sure, if you ignore all the usability problems and handwaving the movie does, the characters are getting what they want on a surface level. But ultimately, the service design of Dome City fails for every reason it could fail.
The (entirely questionable) tendency towards punctuated serial monogamy in pair bonds
A desire for self-determination
Basic self-preservation.
If you don’t understand the goals of your users, you really have no hope of designing for them. And if you’re designing an entire, all-consuming world for those same users, misjudging the human universals puts your entire project—and their world—at risk.
The Übercomputer’s all caps and fixed-width evoke “that look” of early computer interfaces (page 33), as does its OCR sans-serif typeface (page 37) and blue color (page 42).
The SandPhone would have been much more useful as Augmented Reality (chapter 8, page 157)
The Aesculaptor could use a complete revamp from the Medical Chapter (chapter 9, page 258), most notably using waveforms (page 263) and making it feel humane (page 281).
The Evidence Tray reminds us of multifactor authentication (page 118).
Of course The Circuit appears in the Sex chapter (chapter 13, page 293) and as my redesign showed, needed to modernize its matchmaking (page 295) use more subtle cues (page 301). Certainly Jessica-5 could have used a safeword (page 303).
New lessons
The Lifeclock reminds us to keep meaningful colors distinguishable.
The Circuit shows why a serial presentation democritizes options.
The Circuit also shows us that matchmaking must account for compatability, availability, and interest.
The Aesculaptor tells why a system should never fail into a worse state.
Carrousel implies that we don’t hide the worst of a system, but instead cover it in a dazzle pattern.
The improvements I suggested for the SandPhone imply that solving problems higher up the goal chain are much harder but more disruptive.
The Evidence Tray gives us the opposite of the “small interfaces” lesson (page 296), too large an interface can overpromise for small interactions.
I grew up in Texas, and had the chance to visit the Fort Worth Water Gardens and Market Center where some of the scenes were shot. So I have a weirdly personal connection to this movie. Despite that, on review, the interfaces just suck, bless their little interactive hearts. Use them as fodder for apologetics and perhaps as a cautionary tale, but little, little else.
The hedonistic and carefree lifestyle in Dome City comes with a price. When a citizen’s lifeclock begins to blink, it means he or she is now too old, and due to attend a public ritual called Carrousel and die in a public spectacle. As this is a major event in the lives of citizens, most of the public attends these events.
Description
Lastdays are outfitted in special clothes and masks. After filing wearing these costumes and encircling a huge lifeclock, lastdays expose their palms to show the blinking lifeclock to confirm their status.
Then they look up to a crystal at the ceiling that begins to spin. The lastdays become weightless, and they struggle to reach the top, for the opportunity to reach renewal.
When they fail—and they always fail—they explode in a fiery shower of sparks. The audience greets each explosion with a roar of excitement and applause.
Analaysis
A public ritual is at the edge of the definition of interface that I provided in Make It So:
All parts of a thing that enable its use.
But in this case, the culture of Dome City pays for its lavish lifestyle admidst fixed resources with these public executions, and something must turn what by rights should be met with horror and revulsion into something palatable, even enjoyable. It is in this sense that citizens use Carrousel.
Nearly everything we see in the ritual helps to hide its raw, morbid truth. The false promise of renewal hides the finality of the act. The masks won by participants hide the individual identity from the audience, easing the sense of personal loss. The identical costumes dehumanize participants, underscoring their role in the culture. The ritual actions give participants something to do during a time that is psychologically stressful. The public-ness of it reinforces its cultural importance and imprints onto the audience that one day, they do will participate.
One of my favorite interfaces in Logan’s Run is one of the worst in the survey. It’s called The Circuit, and it’s a system for teleporting partners for casual sex right into your living room. ZOMGEVERYBODYSIGNUP.
Credit where it’s due: I first explored this interface in Issue 04 of Raymond Cha’s awesome print zine FAQNP in 2012. I’m going to go into even more nerdly depth on some of the topics here, but it was in that publication that I first got riled up about it. If you want to read those thoughts, you’ll need to go find a back issue and you totally should because the whole zine rocks.
Anyway, this interface is such a hot, hot mess that I have to break it up into a couple of posts. This first one is a description and the first part of a critique.
Description
Early in the film, after a hard day of liquefying runners, Logan-6 comes home to his apartment and wants to add a little sex to his evening. He slips into a robe, grabs a remote control, and begins to twist dials on its surface. In response, we hear frequencies swooping to and fro like someone is tuning an AM radio but never quite finding a station. Meanwhile an alcove on one side of his living room displays a blinking, wispy texture of multicolored light. (It bears a passing resemblance to Star Trek TOS teleporters, for those interested in tracing SFX similarities.)
It takes about 10 seconds of Logan’s tuning, but eventually a figure appears in the lights. It coalesces into a man wearing
This fellow is never named in the movie or the credits or the internet, so I’ll just call him Carl-4. Carl likes what he sees in Logan, and so gives him a showy pose and a winsome smile.
Logan smiles and shakes his head “no,” looks down, and resumes fiddling with his remote control. Carl vanishes quickly in the texture of light. A few seconds of tuning later and Jessica-5 coalesces in the alcove. She looks around a little doe-eyed and dumbfounded, almost as if she stumbled onto the Circuit by accident and is now a little perplexed about how she got here. Nonetheless, she accepts Logan’s extended hand and steps out of the alcove into his apartment where hijinks might have ensued, if it weren’t for her learning he was a Sandman.
Problems
It’s a quick, 50-second scene, meant to wow the audience with futuristic technology, shock and titillate with how casual the sex is in Dome City, and, for purposes of the plot, get the sandman Logan and the revolutionary Jessica in contact for the first time so he can meet her and see her ankh necklace.
I have the distinct impression that this device was first conceived between a pair of roommate movie producers sitting around in their apartment one Saturday in bathrobes, high off their asses, with one of them thumbing through a copy of Penthouse while the other one practiced feathering his hair or whatever they did while they were high in the 70s. The one with the magazine takes a huge hit off his bong and says to the other while blowing out smoke, “Dude. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just reach in to this magazine, and pull one of these girls out of here?” The other of course agrees, pauses with his hairbrush midair to think, and then says, “Dude. We’re movie producers. We can make. That. Shit. Happen.” Because really, that’s the only way something this goofball could have come about.
Mismatched Controls
What the hell is Logan tuning? The 1970s were certainly operating with radio metaphors, but it just doesn’t make sense in this context. Is Jessica being broadcast on a channel? Can two tuners tune her in at the same time? Are there multiple copies of Jessica? That makes no sense unless she’s virtual, which we know she’s not, or instantly/infinitely replicable, which isn’t part of this diegesis.
Why would he have to tune at all? Is he actually trying to get something “right” in the system in order to summon the next candidate? What if he gets it wrong? What if he only tunes a partner in 95%? Can he leave her there indefinitely? What if she steps off at 99.5%? Where does that extra mass go? Instant weight loss, sure, but also the possibility of a teleporter lobotomy.
Is he dialing the preferences for what he’s interested in at that moment? If so, why does he keep tuning even as someone is appearing? If it’s some kind of live results, like Google’s live search, why are the “travelers” of the circuit summoned before he’s done? It’s premature, and premature is bad in casual sex.
As you can tell, I’ve tried to come up with some apologetic answer, and I just can’t think of any way this control makes sense. It’s a sci-fi interface fail.
Lopsided control
For purposes of the description, let’s call Logan a “tuner,” and Carl and Jessica “travelers.” These terms are derived from the scene, not meant to describe some ideal. Note that Logan gets a remote control, but the travelers don’t. They don’t have any controls. It’s tempting to want to imagine that the interior walls of the alcove have some interface that we can’t see, but really the space is too shallow and they are too far away from its walls for that to make any sense. No, this system privileges the tuners with control, and the travelers are just passive participants.
Think about this from the traveler’s perspective. Once Jessica hops on, she gets zapped away from the start location, only to appear in stranger-after-strangers homes, where her choices are to
Accept an offer from a tuner.
Express disinterest in a tuner and get zapped to the next location.
Or…what? What if she gets tired of riding the circuit? Is she stuck? Does she have to just walk into the stranger’s apartment and make awkward small talk, explaining that she’s tired, find the front door as the tuner frustratedly keeps tuning to find someone new, and then step out into a hallway in a random point in Dome City and then find her way home? It would be a terrible experience. She’d never do it.
I spoke with an attendee to the BoingBoing conference about the possibility that this privilege of control might be part of Logan’s job as a Sandman, but we reasoned our way out of that. It’s not mentioned anywhere in the movie, and if riders were simply on a conveyor belt for selection by Sandmen, why is Jessica surprised and flustered to wind up in the apartment of one?
If you’ve studied film theory, you’re probably familiar with a criticism called the male gaze, developed by Laura Mulvey. This interface is lousy with it. If you’re not familar, realize that this was created just to satisfy things from Logan’s perspective, of what would be pleasing for him. No thought at all has been given any of the other participants except as objects to be considered in his whim of instant sex.
When rethinking this, we should consciously redesign the system with less “stoner Penthouse” and more Chatroulette, where at least both participants have control: options to keep going, skip to the next candidate, or bow out at any time.
It’s entirely possible of course that this is just a power exchange, with subs as riders and doms as tuners. After all, they don’t have to ride The Circuit for sex. They have places in Dome City like the Love Shop and the gym where they can go to find a partner in other ways. While this dom-sub possibility might propose some interesting challenges, there’s not a lot of corroborating evidence in the film that this is the case.
Preferences
Finally there’s the notion of preferences. Logan rejects Carl, and his expression as he does so is really bothersome. The smile and head shake say less “Thanks, but not a match,” and more of an offensive “Oh, those silly, silly fags.” (I’m ಠ_ಠ at you, Michael York.) I’m sure in the 1970s, the ambiguity of what Logan was thinking was quite useful. It let both the uptight and queer members in the audience imagine the most palatable reason for the rejection. For our purposes, the rejection of Carl raises the question of preferences.
From the vantage of the 2010s, anyone who’s tried their hand at a matchmaking system knows that preferences are a pretty big deal. There are simply too many candidates out there to consider them one by one, and so expressing preferences helps focus your efforts on a smaller set of more-likely hits. These can either be simple, like the one-time Japanese key fob experiment LoveGety, to systems that let the numbers speak for themselves, like OKCupid, to those that profess the ability to do deep psychological profiling that in turn require hours of your time to answer a battery of questions. Knowing how crucial they are, it’s odd that preferences don’t appear to be part of The Circuit. Why not?
No preferences
One possible reason is that the system didn’t have any preferences. In the 1970s, not even “video (tape) dating” had been invented yet, so preferences may not have been on anyone’s mind in a computational sense. Had the designers given it a bit of thought, they would realize that even then people were expressing some preferences by the choice of party or bar they went to, as they could count on a certain type of person being there. Even the way they dressed and carried themselves was expressing something about who they wanted to be and even do that night. But it’s more likely (if less instructive) that preferences were just not a part of the Circuit.
Logan ain’t feeling it
Another interpretation is that Logan’s rejection of Carl is circumstantial. In this interpretation, Logan is omnisexual, and just happens to be not in the mood for a heaping helping of dude that night. Or maybe Logan would have been fine with a guy, just rejecting this particular one, unwilling to face the challenge of unbuckling all that bling amidst the slipperiness of still-drying tanning butter. That only raises the question of scope: Why can’t Logan capture categorical preferences well in advance, and express circumstantial exceptions or additional preferences in the moment? It’s not a requirement, but it sure would help Logan find what he’s looking for with less of the awkwardness and wasted time of face-to-face rejection.
The system pretends it’s a bit janky to influence him
A final interpretation is that the computer knows Logan’s preferences, but ignores them, on purpose, from time to time. It could be a simple attempt to open his mind to new experiences. It could also be an attempt at persuasion. Similar to how accountants for a publically traded company will make a kind-of bad quarter seem really bad so that the next quarter, even if it’s just a little bit good feel great by comparison, presenting Logan with one choice that’s totally wrong (Carl) may increase his appreciation of the next choice (Jessica). This presumes that the computer has an agenda, is smart about making it happen, is in the business of persuasion, and the system has a serial presentation of candidates, and that’s not all a given in this case. But let’s keep that possibility in mind.
Not a problem: Casualness
Just so it’s clear, I’m not getting on any high horse about casual sex. They’ve cured sexually transmitted infections and birth control is the default. Casual sex a given in this diegesis, and as long as it’s between consenting adults, get over it.
Not a problem: Teleportation
Similarly I’m not going to get into the scientific possibility of teleportation. As far as Logan’s Run is concerned, that’s just a part of his world and the science of it just happens. I’m concerned about the interface that allows use of the tech.
There’s one more potential problem, but it’s extensive enough to warrant it’s own post, so come back tomorrow when I’ll talk about presentation strategies for hooking up in Dome City.
The central technological conceit of the movie is the lifeclock, a rosette crystal that is implanted in each citizens left palm at birth. This clock changes color in stages over the course of the individuals lifetime.
Though the information in the movie is somewhat contradictory as to the actual stages, the DVD has an easter egg that explains the stages as follows.
White
Birth to 8 years
Yellow
9 to 15 years
Green
16 to 23 years
Red
24 years to 10 days before Lastday (30 years)
Blinking Red
from 10 days before Lastday to Lastday
Black
End of Lastday (Carousel/death)
Lifeclocks derive their signal and possibly power from a local-area broadcast in the city. When Logan and Jessica leave the city their lifeclocks turn clear.
The signal of the lifeclock is so central to life that most citizens dress exclusively in colors that match their lifeclock color. Only certain professions, such as Sandmen and the New You doctor, are seen to wear clothing that lacks clear reference to a lifeclock color, even though the individuals in these professions have lifeclocks and are still subject to carousel at Lastday. We can presume, though are not shown explicitly, that certain rights and responsibilities are conferred on citizens in different stages, such as legal age of sexual consent and access to intoxicants, so the clothing acts as a social signal of status.
As an interface the lifeclock is largely passive, and can be discussed for its usability in two main ways.
Color
The first is the color. Are the stages easily discernable by people? The main problem would be between the red and green stages since the forms of red-green color blindness affects around 4% of the population. To accommodate for this, reds are made more discernable with a brighter glow than the green. As a wavelength, red carries the farthest, and blinking is of course a highly visible and attention-getting signal, which makes it difficult for an individual to socially hide that his or her time for carousel has come.
Black is a questionable signal since this indicates actual violation of the law but does not draw any attention to itself. Casual observation of a relaxed hand with a black lifeclock might even be mistaken for a colored lifeclock in shadow, but as the citizenry has complete faith in the system and a number of countermeasures in place to ensure that everyone either attends carousel or is terminated, perhaps this is not a concern.
But if we’re just going on human signal processing, the red should be reserved for LastWeek, and a blinking red for after LastDay. That leaves a color gap between 24 and 30. I’d make this phase blue, since it looks so clearly different from red. The new colors would be as follows.
White
Birth to 8 years
Yellow
9 to 15 years
Green
16 to 23 years
Blue
24 years to 10 days before Lastday (30 years)
Red
from 10 days before Lastday to Lastday
Blinking Red
End of Lastday (Carousel/death)
Location on the body
The second question is the location of the lifeclock. Where should it be placed? It is a social signal, and as such needs to be visible. The parts of the body that are most often seen uncovered in the film are the hand, the neck, and the head. The neck and head are problematic since these are not visible to the citizen himself, useful for reinforcing compliance with the system. This leaves the hand.
Given the hand, the palm seems an odd choice since in a relaxed position or when the hand is in use, the palm is often hidden from view of other people. The colored clothing seen in the film show that a citizens life stage is not really considered a private matter, so a location on the back of the hand would have made more sense. To keep it in view of its owner, a location on the fleshy pad between the thumb and the forefinger would have made a better, if less cinematic, choice.
In a self-contained hedonistic society, the enforced maximum age is 30. Lifeclocks implanted in citizens hands register their ages. Once their time is out and their lifeclocks are blinking, citizens are killed in a public ritual known as Carrousel, [sic] in which they hope to achieve “renewal,” a form of rebirth. Logan 5 is a Sandman, whose job is to catch runners, people who try and escape this fate.
On the body of one of the terminated runners, Logan encounters a mysterious ankh. When he reports this object to the central computer, the computer prematurely ages his lifeclock and sends him on a mission to learn more about an underground resistance movement and a mysterious place called sanctuary. Now a runner himself, Logan gains the trust of resistance member Jessica 6 and escapes the city and the pursuing Sandmen. At the edge of the city, they meet one of the robots that maintain life within the city, and beyond that, the ruins of Washington D.C. There in the outdoors they meet an old man and come to realize the possibility of a life beyond 30.
Returning to the city to try and share their message of liberation, Logan is captured instead. Hearing that Sanctuary does not exist, the computer suffers a meltdown and explodes, ruining the city in the process. Citizens escape to meet the outside world and a new future of age and liberation.
