Introduction

I was taking an afternoon stroll with my wife through our suburban neighborhood when the idea for this blog came to me. I had been mulling over my interest in UX and especially fictional UI designs. When I watch science fiction I tend to scrutinize the interfaces for the gadgets, computers and machinery. I do this partially so that I can use the techniques and motifs in my own design work. For instance, I had an idea for a flash project a few months ago where I would try to imitate the colors and style of 1970s era science fiction anime. This idea is, of course, not completely original; the idea of imitating this style was sparked in my brain by watching Daft Punk's Interstella 5555. Unfortunately I only owned a copy of one or two anime from this period, so I didn't really get as much source material as I needed. But since I was already taking screen shots of science fiction interfaces, it seemed natural to me that I should go ahead and continue taking screen shots from all the anime and science fiction films that I own to create a large morgue file to reference in the future and also add to when I rent more sci-fi movies. In this way I was creating what, in my mind, would be a journal of pictures grabbed from movies as I was exposed to new ideas in fictional UXD.

This brings me back to my epiphany while taking a stroll. It occurred to me then that if I am going through the trouble of taking these screen shots then I should probably organize and present the material in a blog. That way I have motivations to do this in a habitual manner, and there would be more structure for analyzing these interesting designs. This also solves a problem I've been having in coming up with material for blog posts. All the bits seemed to come together rather nicely.

So to begin the blog I've already collected a bank of movies to present and analyze. This will mean that I can post rapidly and build up a large amount of content in a short amount of time. After I've gone through the ones I am currently in possession of, then the posting schedule will slow down. The opportunity to post will only present itself when I come across a new movie with intriguing interfaces. I'm thinking that this blog might at some point expand to include science fiction inspired interfaces from other media like still imagery, television, and video games, but for the mean time I will stick to motion pictures and possibly anime.

I'm not exactly sure how the analyzation will be structured, but I've got a few vague ideas. I know that I will want to outline some of the elements used in the interfaces. There area always common elements that are identifiable from source to source. I'd also like to just do a rough analyzation of how practical the presented UI would be to use. In other words, how realistic is it? Does it adhere to any sort of usability standards used in the real world? Of course this isn't a criteria for the designers who created the fictional UI, but I think it would just be enlightening and fun to see how well they would stand up in the real world.

With any luck, this blog will serve to chronicle some interesting fictional UI and help inspire new directions in real UX design.