In the movie, the heroes map out a potential battlefield in 3-D on a table made of pins, like the pin screens you can use to take an imprint of your face. Caldwell, who worked on topography for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, realized that such a dynamic, re-purposeable topographic display could be built and used to better model battlefields than the static relief maps the Army was using. Part of the future imagined in the movie would go on to become part of the future in reality.
There's a lesson here (several, in fact) that Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff use as the basis for their book, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, which goes on sale Sept. 17 from Rosenfeld Media.
Inspired by their lessons, Wired Design dug up seven of our favorite designs — some found in Make It So, others not. See them in the photos above.
"We know we enjoy [science fiction], culturally, individually," says Noessel, managing director of interaction design at Cooper, a San Francisco design agency. "But you can actually take a look at it with a critical eye, and use that to think about the future, think about technology in the future, and consider if that's the way we want it to be."
It's a theme that appears frequently throughout design and pop culture. Plenty of famous products can trace their origins to ideas seen in sci-fi (and in this gallery, Wired Design wants to share our favorite seven). What Noessel and Shedroff have done is to point out the lessons designers can learn from science fiction in a sort of textbook format (only more enjoyable).
Shedroff is program chair of the California College of the Arts' MBA in Design Strategy, and between his expertise and Noessel's, the emphasis of the book leans heavily toward interface design. That is, it's all about how you interact with stuff, be it a button, a touchscreen, a voice-response system, or a direct-to-brain interface (The Matrix). Okay, that one may not appear anytime soon, but that's not the point. It's about what we can learn from the movie — in this case, we can posit that when designing a virtual space, the things that make us comfortable in real life can do so in virtual reality as well, but when we mess with the familiar, we can expect users to get confused. (See: déjà vu.)
Yes, that's pretty academic. And the book's target audience is designers, science fiction fans (and creators), and business strategists, Noessel says. But hey, did we mention science fiction movies? 
Science fiction is the providence of imagination, which, says Shedroff, is just like design.
"Everything that happens in the design process is fiction until it gets on the market," he says. "We create prototypes; nobody ever sees them. They're inspirational, we learn from them, but they don't exist."
Science fiction movies are a shortcut for design prototypes. Something that works for audiences — or appears to work — from a narrative fictional standpoint, is likely to be an effective interface in real life.
"It doesn't mean that everything you see in science fiction is right," says Shedroff. "That's why it's a prototype, and it may or may not survive, like any other prototype in the real world."
And there are some notable examples of failed prototypes. Noessel and Shedroff point to Minority Report, the canonical gesture-control model, as an interface that will never actually appear. (At least as a whole. Components of it, like swiping to move images, already appear in plenty of places.)
"The whole gesture interface, which everyone loves, if they're a nerd, won't [work]," Shedroff says. "We won't ever see interfaces like that ... The simple reason is, what you don't see there, that's not depicted in the scene, is all the cuts, all the takes that they had to take, the breaks between filming, because Tom Cruise's arms would get tired."
It's an example, says Noessel, of how science fiction reminds us of human constraints. It's a feedback loop that pushes both fields forward.
"It's sort of a subset of art reflects life reflects art," says Noessel. "Science fiction never truly reflects the future, it only reflects an extension of the modern paradigm."
Thus, the responsibility to innovate lies as much on designers as on their science-fiction muses.
Xenotran, the company contracted to build Caldwell's pin map, did just that. Their XenoVision device actually expanded on the idea put forth in X-Men. They laid a vacuum-sealed rubber sheet over the pins, and projected satellite imagery on it. And from that story, Noessel and Shedroff got their simplest rule: Use Science Fiction. It's a tool, a foundation, a way to think about what's possible, what's not, and how it can be better.
Photos: Peter McCollough/Wired
Joseph Flaherty 17 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/cKJUf4YVU5Q/
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