one thing that i vehemently hate about sci-fi movies is the interfaces of whatever computers they have.
i'm sure there are movies out there that nail the ui element of their story, but let me tell you: they are very rare.
for the most part, user interfaces in sci-fi movies are unusable, unreadable, and generally useless—tiny text that keeps moving or scrolling indefinitely, very low contrast between the foreground and background, no logic, and so on.
what baffles me is that, of all the props and things to build for the movie, the user interface is probably the easiest and cheapest thing to get right. yet, it's often the most messed up.
part of the frustration comes from the fact that i believe the way future humans design their interfaces can tell us a lot about how they use technology and even what their society prioritizes. it reflects how they think things should work in that time period.
the most important part about user interfaces in sci-fi movies is that they're often created by people who have never used or even learned about the physical counterparts of the ui elements they're depicting. people in the year 5000 would be surprised to learn that, 3,000 years ago, we used to push real-life, physical buttons, or that the icon they're using for some futuristic tech once represented a real-world object.
this distance from the physical world of today could free future ui designers—whether human or not—from the mental constraints we have due to how we currently interact with physical things.
it's an interesting concept that most writers, directors, set builders, or whoever is responsible don't seem to care about. and that's a real bummer.
see you tomorrow.