Make It So Blog

Looking for more recent blog posts? Check out https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/.

I can’t tell you how awesome (and weird) it is to have the print version of the book in hand, hot off the press. The smell of the ink and feel of the cover bring back sweet memories from my print design days. I can’t wait to start hearing readers’ feedback and joining conversations. Author pride going at warp 10.

This is a pretty amazing development. As the patent war heats-up in the mobile computing sector, Scifi is being recognized as instances of “prior art.”

Essentially, Samsung is using a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey to bash Apple’s IP case, citing it as prior art for tablets. There isn’t much in the scene that shows tablets in actual use (two sit on a table playing an interview but there’s no interaction with them). Better clips might have come from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which uses PADDs throughout that and the following series.

Read the article at FOSS Patents

We have two thoughts:

1. To interaction designers, this means knowing scifi could become a vital part of their work, since it’s public prior art.

2. To studios, this creates some pressure to use experienced designers (outside of production designers) on staff (or consulting) for interface/interaction design. It might also signal the possibility for studios to begin patenting what comes out of their own imaginations, since the relevancy to industry may be just a matter of time.

We haven’t posted in awhile but we thought I’d give a quick update. The book is coming together really well and the first draft should be finished in roughly 30 days (at least, we hope). We thought we’d publish the list of properties we’ve reviewed so far (not all are films and television shows). Not all of these will make it into the book and it’s clear to us that we have way more material than one book will hold (sequel perhaps?). However, we want to make sure that, on this maiden voyage, we don’t leave-out anything critical (or something we’re going to be crucified for later, for not including). So, in the interest of transparency, here is what we’ve made it through so far. If you don’t see something on the list that you think we should know about, now’s the time to speak up!

Thanks.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Adaptive Path Charmr
Aeon Flux
Aesthedes
AI
Alien
Alien Resurrection
Alien vs. Predator
Apple Project 2000
Armageddon
Avatar
Back to the Future
Barbarella
Batman
Battlestar Gallactica
Big Bang Theory
Blade Runner
Brainstorm
Brazil
Buck Rogers (1939)
Children of Men
Chronicles Of Riddick
Chrysalis
Cisco Telepresence
City of Lost Children
Clockwork Orange
Cowboy Bebop
Dark Star
Defying Gravity
Deja Vu
Deka Prosthetic Arm
Demolition Man
Demon Seed
Destination Moon
District 9
Dollhouse
Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Who
Dune
Eagle Eye
Enemy Mine
Equilibrium
Event Horizon
eXistenZ
Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four Silver Surfer
Firefly
Flesh Gordon
Flesh Gordon 2
Flight of the Navigator
Flightplan
Forbidden Planet
Futurama
Futureworld
Galaxy Quest
Gamer
Gattaca
Ghost in the Shell 2
Hackers
Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Hollow Man
HP Halo
Inception
Independence Day
Iron Man
Iron Man 2
Johnny Mnemonic
Jurassic Park
Kekkou Kammen
Knight Rider
Knowledge Navigator (Apple)
Lawnmower Man
Le Voyage Dans La Lune
Lifted
Logan’s Run
Looker
Lost in Space (film)
Lost in Space (TV)
Marooned
Men In Black
Metropolis
Microsoft Actimates
Microsoft BOB
Microsoft Photosynth
Minority Report
Mission to Mars
Moon
Motorola StarTAC
Ms. Dewey (Microsoft)
Odorama
Outer Limits
Pandorum
Paprika
Paycheck
Pi
Pitch Black
Pultius Products
Quantum Leap
Red Planet
Renaissance
RIBA and RI-MAN (robots)
Rocketship XM 2
Serenity
Silent Running
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Sleeper
Solaris
Space Truckers
Space-1999
Star Trek (TV series and films)
Star Wars I-VI
Stargate Universe
Starship Troopers
Strange Days
Sun Starfire
Sunshine
Supernova
The Abyss
The Cell
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Fifth Element
The Final Cut
The Glass Bottom Boat
The Incredibles
The Island
The Last Starfighter
The Lathe of Heaven
The Matrix
The Terminator
The Tonky
The Truman Show
The Visitor
Things to Come
Timeline
Torchwood
Total Recall
Transformers
Transformers 2
TRON
Until the End of the World
Vanilla Sky
Virtuality
Visual Human Project
WALL-E
War Games
Watchmen
Westworld
When Worlds Collide
Wildfire
X-Men
X-Men 2
Xenotran Xenovision
Zardoz

Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel who’s work complements our own investigation well. He’s a sharp, fun, and fascinating guy who is exploring how Science Fiction is already being used as a prototyping process for the development of real technologies, products, and services.

His latest two books (he wrote Screen Future last year), investigate the subject from two different perspectives. The first, Science Fiction Prototyping, directly investigates how SF can be used as a design technique, complete with interviews, examples, and some process description. It’s a fun, smart read. You can download his book in PDF here: http://www.morganclaypool.com/toc/csl/1/1

The second, The Tomorrow Project, is a set of commissioned SciFi stories specifically to inspire designers and developers to create new things using these stories as a departure

This is the video from our presentation of Make It So at MacWorld this year. It contains some of what is in our draft Chapter 1 on this site.

Upcoming Appearances and Presentations

Past Appearances and Presentations

We’re really excited to finally have this book on its way to being published. We have been researching this material for over three years now, and have found some incredible examples we’ll share with you.