Archive for June, 2009
Sci Fi and Design
Ben Reed posted this story to my Facebook wall (would link to it, but ya know, that walled-garden thing is in the way).
I’ve always felt SciFi writers help guide the development of technology by ‘designing’ without logistical constraint. (See No. 4 at link below.)
Here’s the link he was talking about. It’s about stuff from the movie Blade Runner that has become real in the time since it was made. In particular, this one is about a new camera rig from Adobe that allows you to take infinitely scalable photos.*
And here’s my response, which grew too big for me to be willing to leave it in my little patch of the walled garden.**
To your point about “design”: I tend to like sci fi stories that focus more on the experience of the characters using technology to resolve larger conflicts, and less on the boring implementation details that would solve the logistical constraints to create said tools. (Unless of course those constraints are an important part of the story (such as the 1983 movie Brainstorm (classic 80s sci fi, highly recommended)), but who cares about the Tyrell Corporation’s supply chain issues?)
I believe good product designers also share the sci fi writer’s healthy disregard for the arbitrary, shifting constraints of the present. It has to be balanced for sure (compromise is a fact of life), but the focus of the story/product should be on the character/user experience.
* There have been ways to do this (almost) since the early 90s, without special optics. While images compressed using a fractal iterated function system can be “zoomed” infinitely during decompression, they exhibit strange artifacts in practice.
** Sadly, my facebook page probably gets more traffic than my blog.