At First, Mechanical Controls Were Nowhere
In the first sci-fi film, Le voyage dans la lune, one detail that may be surprising to modern viewers is that it contains nothing that a modern audience would recognize as an interface. When the “astronomers” open the rocket door, they simply push on it—there’s not even a handle (see below). To launch the rocket, they load it, bullet style, into an oversized gun and shoot it at the moon. That there are no interfaces isn’t really surprising, because this short movie is a vaudevillian comedy sketch put to film. But more to the point, when the film was released at the turn of the 20th century, very few interfaces existed in the modern sense. Audiences and filmmakers alike were working in an industrial age paradigm. The few controls that did exist in the world at this time were mechanical. People interacted with them using physical force, such as pulling a lever, pushing a button, or turning a knob.

Le voyage dans la lune (1902, restoration of the hand-colored release).

In the 1920s and 1930s, as the developed world moved into the electric age, buttons, switches, and knobs made their way into industrial machinery and consumer goods that people used every day. As a result, these mechanical controls began to appear everywhere in sci-fi, too. In one example, the control panel from the Lower City in the 1927 dystopian film Metropolis shows an interface crowded with electric outputs and controls. As we continue to trace interfaces throughout this section, note the continued dominance of mechanical controls like momentary buttons, sliders, and knobs.

Metropolis (1927).

World War I played a role in shaping the physical appearance of sci-fi interfaces as well, as servicemen brought their experiences with military technology back home as consumers, audiences, and sci-fi makers. In the 1939 serial Buck Rogers, we see this in action. Buttons already inhabit the interface at this point, as in the “Tele-vi” wall viewer, controlled by just a few knobs, like televisions of the day.

Buck Rogers, “Tragedy on Saturn” (c. 1939).

When Captain Rankin and Professor Huer surmise that one of Killer Kane’s ships they’ve detected is being flown by Buck, they want to contact the ship. Instead of invoking audio functions right there at the screen, they move to an adjacent “radio room” where they can hail him. To modern audiences this seems silly. Why aren’t these two capabilities located in the same spot? But the state of military technology at the time held that the radio room was a special place where this equipment was operated, even if it was set far apart from a periscope or other viewing device.

Buck Rogers, “Tragedy on Saturn” (c. 1939).

Sci-fi has long built its spacefaring notions by extending seafaring metaphors. (The word astronaut literally means “star sailor.”) By the 1940s and 1950s, sci-fi films like Forbidden Planet typically depicted its starship interfaces with large banks of mechanical controls of many types, such as those that sailors might have seen in the control rooms of great ships of World War II.

Forbidden Planet (1956).

Often, the mechanical controls of early sci-fi seemed disconnected from displays and neatly ordered by type in rows as in the image from Forbidden Planet. In some cases, like the 1951 film When Worlds Collide, production designers imagined putting the controls around the displays, where the user’s actions and the system’s results would be more connected. In the illustration below, the V and F knobs control the spaceship’s trajectory, seen on the display as white points along the red and green lines.

When Worlds Collide (1951).

In Buck Rogers, the two parts of the communication interface are in separate rooms. If Professor Huer wanted to tell Buck how to level his spaceship, the professor would have to run to the radio room to provide spoken instructions, or input, and back to the Tele-vi to check on Buck’s progress, the output (see Figure 2.3b, c). Where the Buck Rogers scenario requires far too much work to be considered an efficient feedback loop, the navigation interface from When Worlds Collide is much tighter, with its controls abutting the output screen and fuel gauge, making much less work for its navigator. Imagine the disaster if the V and F controls were in the next room.

This period also saw early sci-fi endeavors to depict the future with a dedicated realism. For example, Destination Moon made an earnest attempt to describe a trip to the moon with real science and plot, 19 years before the Apollo 11 mission would launch. Renowned science fiction author Robert Heinlein acted as contributor and technical advisor to the film. Unlike competing films of the era, which simply crammed as many buttons, switches, and knobs as possible onto the set to make them look sophisticated, Destination Moon portrayed a more serious and believable story through its constrained interfaces of more-considered controls and displays. These suggested a thoughtful reality behind them, even though at the time they were still entirely fictional. They were designed as if they could be real, not unlike a real prototype of a spaceship might be.

Destination Moon (1950).

By the 1950s, buttons, switches, and knobs were seen as a panacea to life’s drudgeries. A delightful example of this appears in General Motors’ 1956 production of its annual touring auto show Motorama. It was one of the first examples of a corporation creating speculative fiction to promote its brand (and although not technically sci-fi, illustrative enough to bear mention here). It included the wonderfully melodramatic industrial film Design for Dreaming, in which a near-future housewife prepares a meal while dancing around her Frigidaire kitchen of the future. All of her once-dreary tasks, such as baking a cake, carrying dishes, and cleaning up, were accomplished simply by pushing buttons.

Design for Dreaming (1956).

Between the 1950s and 1980s, the trend for mechanical controls continued, despite a few new interface paradigms appearing. There were voice interfaces on robots, like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Twiki with Dr. Theopolis from the 1979 TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, as well as artificial intelligences like the ship computers in Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was also a gestural interface in The Day the Earth Stood Still. These alternative interfaces were in the minority, though, until some budget constraints introduced a new paradigm.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation was green-lighted for production in the mid-1980s, the budget didn’t allow for the same kind of jewel-like buttons as in the original series.

Star Trek: The Original Series (1968)

The money for so many buttons, individually installed and lit, simply wasn’t available. Instead, production designer Michael Okuda and his staff devised an elegant and much less expensive solution—vast backlit panels of plastic film with simply printed graphics representing controls. The result was thoughtfully futuristic as well as cost-effective, and the result inadvertently launched a new paradigm in interfaces that we see throughout the sci-fi genre today, in which controls exist only as a flat touch-screen surface. In Star Trek, this interface is known as LCARS (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System). Though the characters never use this term in the shows or films, it has appeared in some of the on-screen interfaces.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) LCARS interface.

Setting the stage for Okuda’s solution were new, experimental interfaces that had been developing between the first and second Star Trek series. One example is the Aesthedes computer, a graphics workstation produced by the Dutch company Claessens in 1982 (shown below). The computer’s functions were arrayed across a seamless tabletop surface, with each function given a separate button, arranged in logical groups. This made it wide enough to be a literal desktop of controls. Like the LCARS interface, these buttons had almost no depth. Instead, they were part of a seamless membrane that stretched over the entire surface, printed with labels and borders, with simple contact sensors positioned underneath. They were a transitional technology, still mechanical but very different than the kinds of buttons seen and used before. They represented a half step toward interfaces like LCARS, but, unlike LCARS, they weren’t changeable, since they weren’t also a display. This style of mechanical interface, on the border between mechanical and virtual, didn’t catch on, but during this time of experimentation, it was an option very much like what was explored in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Aesthedes computer (c. 1982)

We see that even in modern sci-fi with advanced digital controls, mechanical controls are still present. In the reboot of Star Trek the interfaces on the Enterprise use a blend of touch-screen surfaces and mechanical controls. The throttle for the helm is mechanical and familiar for the audience, who has experienced or seen similar controls on ships and airplanes.

Star Trek (2009).

One of the benefits of mechanical controls is that, unlike touch-screen controls, they can be well-designed for our entire hands rather than just the fingertips, offering ergonomic shapes and rich haptic feedback. Additionally, mechanical controls can take advantage of a user’s finer motor control and offer industrial design that telegraphs to the user how it can be used. For example, the shape of a button or knob might better communicate optimal position or the amount of force to be used. The diameter of a knob can make fine control easier or more difficult, depending on the exertion needed for fingers or hands to move it. This not only increases control and comfort, making some actions easier but also communicating function through the physical form, itself, the property that interaction designers call “affordance.”

Just as in real design and engineering, the presence of mechanical controls followed trends pertaining to material costs and scarcity. At one time, buttons and other components were relatively inexpensive due to their materials and manufacturing processes, so they abounded in both real and fictional interfaces. When the sheer number of controls and their expense (both for materials, installation, and maintenance) rose, however, they began to be used more sparingly. We see this today as touch-screen interfaces are able to incorporate many functions with no added cost, so many mechanical controls are disappearing. In addition, too many undifferentiated buttons can breed confusion, and overload for audiences and users alike.

For example, we see this in the lineage of Star Trek interfaces. The original series used many, individually lit buttons, often positioned in rows circling the user (which is more complicated than rectilinear rows). But when the production budget available for the next series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, didn’t go as far, that was no longer an option. Instead, the mechanical buttons disappeared almost entirely from control interfaces, in lieu of flat-panel touch screens. This persisted throughout the following TV series and many of the films, until the latest film, Star Trek, created a rebooted aesthetic based on a complement of mechanical and touchscreen interfaces.

Be warned, though, that hybrid controls can still seem out of place or even laughable. A funny example comes from the climactic sequence at the end of Star Trek: Insurrection. After an entire film of Star Trek’s signature touchscreen (LCARS) interfaces for controlling nearly everything that happens on the ship, Commander Riker calls for the “manual weapons interface,” and a 1990s-era joystick pops up from a console designed specifically for this one purpose. It isn’t that this is a worse interface for this use—indeed, it may actually be better. The joke is that everything in the film leading up to this, including flying the ship and shooting weapons, never used such an interface. If it was a useful and even better weapons control, why wouldn’t it have been the used in battles before this moment in the story?

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998).