Your author, considering his solution to the Kobayashi Maru during a shake-out run on a Class D starship.
There was recently a wonderful article on Ars Technica interviewing the production and prop designers for Star Trek. I highly recommend giving it a read, even if you’re not a Trekkie. What I find most curious is the creative constraints that the production design was under and their solution. With a limited budget for doing lots of physical design, they decided to draw the user interfaces, rather than assemble them from hardware like knobs and buttons and so on. The idea of a screen-based display that would change based on what it needed to do — a “soft” interface — arose.
“The initial motivation for that was in fact cost,” Okuda explained. “Doing it purely as a graphic was considerably less expensive than buying electronic components. But very quickly we began to realize—as we figured out how these things would work and how someone would operate them, people would come to me and say, ‘What happens if I need to do this?’ Perhaps it was some action I hadn’t thought of, and we didn’t have a specific control for that. And I realized the proper answer to that was, ‘It’s in the software.’ All the things we needed could be software-definable.”
(via http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago.ars)
so are you making a list of TV shows and movie franchises that seem to have potential for near-future technological break-throughs? tracking design artists who trained with the folks who "built" the Star Trek technological look? this was fascinating.
so are you making a list of TV shows and movie franchises that seem to have potential for near-future technological break-throughs? tracking design artists who trained with the folks who "built" the Star Trek technological look? this was fascinating.
Mmhmm