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aqword 's review for:
Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons From Science Fiction
by Nathan Shedroff
This book has an intriguing premise, but no clear target audience.
The premise is to draw interaction design lessons from interfaces in scifi films and tv shows. In theory, because those interfaces visualize the future, they should be able to help designers to imagine interfaces beyond historic constraints.
The ostensible audience for these lessons is interaction designers, but the problem with writing for such an audience is that most or all of the lessons presented should already be patently obvious to most interaction designers. While a non-designer might find a lesson to "beware the uncanny valley" (written after observation of humanoid robots) to be mildly interesting, designers are likely to find such a lesson to be old news. Yet the non-designer is not likely to care enough about interaction design to want to read a full book of such lessons, so the book falls short of having any clear target audience.
The book does have a few fun examples of how scifi can be applied to the real world, such as:
• The X-Men movie (from 2000) has a table with pins that rise up to form local topology. After seeing the movie, a worker at the US Army Topographic Engineering Center commissioned a table using similar mechanics to be created in reality (p. 11-3).
• Volumetric projections in scifi suffer from a gaze-matching problem. If one person is conversing by looking down at the volumetric projection of another person, then either (a) the projection that the other person is looking at will have to be above them or else (b) the projection can be placed below the other person's gaze as well, and both people's downward-pointing eyes will send a social signal of submissiveness. A way to solve this would be to automatically change the direction of the speaker's eyes, something which has real-world application for video-chatting, where both speakers appear to be looking down because they're looking at screens placed below webcams (p. 81-4).
• In Star Wars Episode IV, gunners can hear fighters fly past their ship in space and can hear explosions when they hit those ships. Rather than treating this as an error in production (sound unrealistically traveling through space), the authors consider how such sounds could be useful as an augmented reality system; the ship's sensors could determine where other ships were and then play sounds to simulate their position, helping to give the gunners an increased awareness. By using ambient sound to convey useful information the system can make an unfamiliar situation easier to grasp (p. 113).
The premise is to draw interaction design lessons from interfaces in scifi films and tv shows. In theory, because those interfaces visualize the future, they should be able to help designers to imagine interfaces beyond historic constraints.
The ostensible audience for these lessons is interaction designers, but the problem with writing for such an audience is that most or all of the lessons presented should already be patently obvious to most interaction designers. While a non-designer might find a lesson to "beware the uncanny valley" (written after observation of humanoid robots) to be mildly interesting, designers are likely to find such a lesson to be old news. Yet the non-designer is not likely to care enough about interaction design to want to read a full book of such lessons, so the book falls short of having any clear target audience.
The book does have a few fun examples of how scifi can be applied to the real world, such as:
Spoiler
• The X-Men movie (from 2000) has a table with pins that rise up to form local topology. After seeing the movie, a worker at the US Army Topographic Engineering Center commissioned a table using similar mechanics to be created in reality (p. 11-3).
• Volumetric projections in scifi suffer from a gaze-matching problem. If one person is conversing by looking down at the volumetric projection of another person, then either (a) the projection that the other person is looking at will have to be above them or else (b) the projection can be placed below the other person's gaze as well, and both people's downward-pointing eyes will send a social signal of submissiveness. A way to solve this would be to automatically change the direction of the speaker's eyes, something which has real-world application for video-chatting, where both speakers appear to be looking down because they're looking at screens placed below webcams (p. 81-4).
• In Star Wars Episode IV, gunners can hear fighters fly past their ship in space and can hear explosions when they hit those ships. Rather than treating this as an error in production (sound unrealistically traveling through space), the authors consider how such sounds could be useful as an augmented reality system; the ship's sensors could determine where other ships were and then play sounds to simulate their position, helping to give the gunners an increased awareness. By using ambient sound to convey useful information the system can make an unfamiliar situation easier to grasp (p. 113).