xenovision
When Doug Caldwell went to see the movie *X-Men*, he wasn't thinking about his day job. But what he saw would change his life ... and the way the U.S. military makes war.
In the movie, the heroes create the layout of 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 had worked on topography projects for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and realized that the X-Men's dynamic, re-purposeable display was not only feasible, it would be a marked improvement over the static relief maps used by the Army. He left the movie with plans to build a product inspired by an imaginary future.
Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff use this example (and many others) as the basis for their book, *[Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction](http://www.scifiinterfaces.com/)*, which goes on sale Sept. 17 from Rosenfeld Media.
"We know we enjoy \[science fiction\], culturally, individually," says Noessel, managing director of interaction design at [Cooper](http://www.cooper.com/#home), 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. 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). But rather than focusing on the standard sci-fi gadgets that have been discussed heavily, they lean towards their area of expertise: interface design.
*(Inspired by their lessons, Wired Design dug up seven of our favorite sci-fi inspired designs — some found in* Make It So, *and reflective of the book's study of user interfaces, and a few others that we just kinda love. See them in the photos above)*.
Shedroff is program chair of the California College of the Arts' [MBA in Design Strategy](http://www.cca.edu/academics/graduate/design-mba), and between his expertise and Noessel's, the emphasis of the book leans heavily towards how you interact with stuff, be it a button, a touchscreen, a voice-response system, or a direct-to-brain interface (*[The Matrix](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/03/dayintech_0331)*).
It is 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 province 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](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/underwire/2012/06/minority-report-idea-summit/), 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, and a responsibility of both designers and sci-fi scribes to help push each other to new levels of innovation.
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.
*XenoVision photos: (left) Courtesy Dynamitic Matrix Display, Xenotran LLC 2002. (right) Screenshot, X-Men. Photos (middle, bottom): Peter McCollough/Wired.*
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