Should the future look "Futuristic?"

[davejames]

One huge failing in almost all screen attempts at futurism is the bizarre belief that in the future there will be lots and lots of empty spaces. And everybody's homes will be as bare as motel rooms. What's scattered about will sometimes be deliberately retro but there will always be lots of miscellaneous junk. I suppose being too cheap to really decorate the sets plays a role.

I can see a future with more and more people becoming less materialistic and bored with junk. I know I am. Combine that with the fact that a lot of things being shunted into computers and iPhones and I can imagine a future that's pretty bare.

Nah, I'm sure people will always have a need to collect stuff. Maybe it won't be the same kinds of things we collect today (movies, action figures, old vinyl albums, etc), but it'll be something.

 

[davejames]

Regarding fashion, the other thing that always bugs me is how everyone in these stories appear to dress in the same exact style. Whether it's the generic jumpsuits of Trek or the really crazy and colorful outfits of 5th Element.

When the truth is it'll probably be much like today-- there will be a handful of people (most of them the younger generation) walking around in outrageous outfits and crazy looking hair, and the rest will be wearing the same boring shirts and pants we've been wearing forever.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Space: 1999 had the same issue of screaming...look the future while giving us uniforms with bell bottoms and platform shoes, and lots of molded plastic furniture.

Lucas' THX 1138 (1971) had a white minimalist production design and wardrobe. It looked futuristic in an institutional way with a totalitarian government making everything monochrome white and the same.

I feel the Space: 1999 series had production design that echoed the mostly white production design of the 2001: A Space Odyssey film. The overall feel of the uniforms felt like the future. The platforms and bell bottoms should have been eliminated from the design. The light grey color of the uniforms though looked futuristic.

Kubrick's film was designed in 1965 as Principal photography began December 1965. Space:1999 shot in November 1973. Both of these examples and Star Trek XI (2009) use a similar look of white for the production design of the sets.

Star Wars and Alien art director Roger Christian
Star Wars (1977) had lots of white in the corridors of stardestroyers including the stormtroopers uniforms.
Roger Christian's design of the Nostromo ship's living quarters in Alien (1979) looked very futuristic with all white everywhere. It started shooting in July 1978.

Look at Star Trek series. While the tunics in TOS were not seen as uniforms in ENT and instead replaced with jumpsuits that look like 1980s Space Shuttle jumpsuits I think the uniforms of TNG & VOY look futuristic.

When The Island (2005) came out the white uniforms they wore looked futuristic. Ewan McGregor even comments why are they white? and that they were constantly getting dirty.

The choice of Enterprise bridge production design incorporating a lot of white in the bridge & corridors gives the feel of Space: 1999 & 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as Star Wars.


Phase II of Star Trek which became ST:TMP

They called upon Ralph McQuarrie, famous for his Star Wars production designs, to help create the design for a new retrofitted Enterprise. Mike Minor, who would go on to do production design for the first two Trek films, created the new look for the Phase II Enterprise interiors (you can see many of those details carried forward into the films and TNG).

see the illustration here of the bridge with lots of monochrome white in the design.
ST:TMP the refitted Constitution-class starship USS Enterprise-A's bridge (see photos at the link)
as well as
in 2286 (STIV:TVH)
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A), STV: TFF

Part of this style of production design using white creates a minimalistic feeling or mood. I feel this is partly how the makeup store Sephora is designed. Mostly white and some black lines & the product. Goto google search and click on images and type in " "minimalist white" " and see more design like this.

 

[DarthTom]

The most realistic look for the future is pretty much for it to look the same. Different colors, cleaner or dirtier depending on which way you think the local crime-rate/economy went but mostly, the same.

I think all sci-fi shows should hire Apple to do set designs henceforth.

 

[RAMA]

In the Lost in Space thread the reviewer covered an episode called "Return from Outer Space" where Will Robinson gets beamed back Earth in the "present" (which for the series was 1997). What always struck me about the episode was how not futuristic the town Will Robinson visits appeared. In fact the entire community looked rather retrograde and would not have seemed out of place on The Andy Griffith Show. Even as a kid watching Lost in Space in reruns during the 1980s, I never bought the idea that Will Robinson was actually supposed on Earth in the 1990s. For me, what hurt the story was that this place that was supposed to exist 10 years in my future seemed not only out of date but lacked anything that screams look I'm in the future.

When you really think about though, the future rarely looks "futuristic." If the youthful me of the 1980s had been pulled into small town America in 2012 would it really seem all that futuristic? Yeah some of the TVs would be flat, and the cars might be curvier, and people would be carrying their telephones in their pockets...but how much of that would be noticeable?

It goes to the question of how should the future be depicted on TV. Irwin Allen productions, despite their outlandish stories, usually had a VERY restrained visions of the future. Some of that is budgetary. But more often than not, his shows never look or feel like they take place in the future. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea takes place between 1973-1984 yet with the exception of the odd video phone (which appears in season 2 and then disappears) never looks more advanced than the 1960s. The same was largely try for his other series. Compare this to say Gerry Anderson who always tried to make things look futuristic. UFO features a very "mod" 1960s vision of futurism with jet cars, Nehru Jackets and purple wigs. UFO manages to scream futuristic while also looking very dated. Space: 1999 had the same issue of screaming...look the future while giving us uniforms with bell bottoms and platform shoes, and lots of molded plastic furniture.

So the question is, who futuristic should the future look? Does trying to make the future seem like the future actually work against such productions in the long run?

The advance of technology has been exponential through time, even depressions and human caused downturns haven't stopped it. People adopted phones in 50 years, computers in 20, cell phones in 10. We are living in a world where that advance will only accelerate...it will go beyond noticing a few info-technologies to a point where we will learn more in each succeeding 5 years than the decades before it. Eventually we should hit a singularity..a point at which we can no longer predict what will come after....here's where my POV has changed in SF...I can watch SF of any type still, but I'll always take it with a grain of salt unless it accounts in some way for these changes. Even in the great novel "Hyperion" societies went unchanged for 100s of years. In Star Trek, the advance of tech is hopelessly linear and understated. I'd say by 2050, we won't recognize much of the world around us..much less the 23rd and 24th centuries. I used to feel ST's universe was so advanced and only 2 decades after discovering it, I feel it is already obsolete.

I just finished "Marooned in Realtime" by Vernor Vinge. It was written in the mid-80s. In it, the last remaining survivors traveled in stasis through time. The last remaining humans from 2195 to 2210 are called "high techs"...they were the most advanced people, but the weapons and equipment from just 5 years before were obsolete compared to the later equipment, even finally down to the last two survivors: one from 2202, one from 2210, the difference made the last one by far the more powerful. This is what we should be seeing in our SF.

 

[Warped9]

I just finished "Marooned in Realtime" by Vernor Vinge. It was written in the mid-80s. In it, the last remaining survivors traveled in stasis through time. The last remaining humans from 2195 to 2210 are called "high techs"...they were the most advanced people, but the weapons and equipment from just 5 years before were obsolete compared to the later equipment, even finally down to the last two survivors: one from 2202, one from 2210, the difference made the last one by far the more powerful. This is what we should be seeing in our SF.

Sounds interesting. Maybe I should look this up.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I also have to say that the way we see the future is also very dependent on how we look at things presently, based on what we know and what's available. Someone mentioned that anything that tries to be futuristic would look dated in time, and that's very true. Again, that's due to the social concepts we have, as we often can't think much beyond what we already have and the future will never look the way we expect it to look.

I found this great clip from the 1960's view of what the internet would be like:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc[/yt]

 

[MANT!]

. Irwin Allen productions, despite their outlandish stories, usually had a VERY restrained visions of the future. Some of that is budgetary. But more often than not, his shows never look or feel like they take place in the future.

The purest vision that Irwin Allen had of the future was his TV pilot "City Beneath the Sea"..and his budget was practially unlimited at the time..

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNH_q0qXSHw[/yt]

too bad it didn't sell...
but to me..it's still possible for that look to become reality..

just not the underwater city or the flying subs..too many technical issues there..

but the look... nice

 

[RAMA]

What would the future look like before the singularity? Flexible and integrated...no tech has to be so specialized for one purpose. Nanotech might extend what we think of objects and machines into malleable constructs..into "smart" clouds...something called foglets. We can create things we need right from the ground up, in any form, even to the point of downloading our brain patterns into a simulacrum of a human body. In such a climate of technology, aesthetics might really not be a consideration, unless it was actively pursued.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_matter

http://bigthink.com/ideas/40291

 

[Mistral]

The episode of LIS in question never bothered me. It was set in a small rural town-- such places still exist today, let alone in 1997.

But I do like it when movies and TV shows depict the future as somewhat futuristic. Unfortunately, that's pretty much gone out of fashion and the future usually looks more like the past-- I'm tired of spaceship interiors that look like factory basements. I saw a movie on Sciffy a couple of weeks ago that was set aboard an interstellar colonization vessel that was made up of dark corridors, metal gratings, big clanging doors and even manhole covers. It was completely ridiculous. One of the reasons SF interested me as a kid was the exotic, futuristic aspect-- nowadays they seem to go out of their way to look mundane. The reason Bladerunner has "aged well" is that pop culture has, at best, been stagnant for thirty years. I'd rather see something like The Jetsons or TOS than the gray, dismal stuff we've been getting lately.

I wouldn't say pop culture is stagnant-but I will say this. John Birmingham, in his Axis of Time books, has a character from 2021 reflecting that NOTHING in pop media gets thrown away since the advent of electronic recording because everything is important to somebody. So she has the Simpson's theme as her email alert and knows the words to Sympathy For the Devil. Such is the future-a mash-up of the past and present.

 

[RAMA]

I just finished "Marooned in Realtime" by Vernor Vinge. It was written in the mid-80s. In it, the last remaining survivors traveled in stasis through time. The last remaining humans from 2195 to 2210 are called "high techs"...they were the most advanced people, but the weapons and equipment from just 5 years before were obsolete compared to the later equipment, even finally down to the last two survivors: one from 2202, one from 2210, the difference made the last one by far the more powerful. This is what we should be seeing in our SF.

Sounds interesting. Maybe I should look this up.

Mostly the concepts are "off screen" so to speak...we are told their "autons" and equipment are more advanced, but not specified. In one case a simple liferaft of the final survivor includes a construction technique that is unfathomable to the super advanced leader of the group who left Earth only 10 years before. The overall concept of where man disappeared to in the novel has a lot to do with this advance in technology though how it did so is not explored.

Incidentally, the writer, Vernor Vinge popularized the concept and came up with the term for "singularity":

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

 

[davejames]

In Star Trek, the advance of tech is hopelessly linear and understated. I'd say by 2050, we won't recognize much of the world around us..much less the 23rd and 24th centuries. I used to feel ST's universe was so advanced and only 2 decades after discovering it, I feel it is already obsolete.

Maybe, but 60 years ago people also thought we'd have moon colonies, flying cars, and robot servants by now. While obviously there HAVE been incredible advances in technology since then, stylisically the world hasn't changed nearly as much as people expected.

And I suspect it'll be the same way 50 or 100 years from now. We might have lots of cooler gadgets by then, but the world as a whole will still look much the way it does now.

 

[Ian Keldon]

I think, as several have pointed out, that there are too many questions to be asked before that particular question can be answered.

 

[RAMA]

In Star Trek, the advance of tech is hopelessly linear and understated. I'd say by 2050, we won't recognize much of the world around us..much less the 23rd and 24th centuries. I used to feel ST's universe was so advanced and only 2 decades after discovering it, I feel it is already obsolete.

Maybe, but 60 years ago people also thought we'd have moon colonies, flying cars, and robot servants by now. While obviously there HAVE been incredible advances in technology since then, stylisically the world hasn't changed nearly as much as people expected.

And I suspect it'll be the same way 50 or 100 years from now. We might have lots of cooler gadgets by then, but the world as a whole will still look much the way it does now.

Again though this is linear thinking and not really surprising, "it'll be different but the same"...the whole point is, it really won't be that familiar because the change is hard to imagine in so short a time. In some cases because of the tech I point out in the links earlier. I've tried to impress upon people in the tech forum and elsewhere that the future isn't about flying cars, and the industrail age stuff you see from 50s film shorts, it'll be about the stuff that's really important, info-tech that isn't just a level or two above from a wheeled vehicle to a flying car but processing speed and resulting technologies that are million of times more advanced. Think of how much "smarter" a 2012 model is than a car in 1990 or 1980.

 

[Ian Keldon]

Again though this is linear thinking and not really surprising, "it'll be different but the same"...the whole point is, it really won't be that familiar because the change is hard to imagine in so short a time.

Form follows function. So things that do the a job 50 years from now will look at least somewhat like things that do that job today. The more basic the function, the less that technological advance will change the form.

Take bluejeans, for example. Simple, rugged, basic pants that have gone basically unchanged for well over a century. Hand tools still look like hand tools. Cars have updated their appearance and capabilities somewhat, but they still consist of a body shell, wheels, seats, a dashboard, etc.

 

[Warped9]

RAMA, I like your avatar. The cover from Greg Bear's Anvil Of Stars right? I have that book and read it several years ago. A fine read.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Some technologies that I'm expecting to become important in the next few decades are:

• Augmented reality (see Vinge's Rainbows End) and communications devices to become much more discrete and eventually be surgically implantable.
• Smart materials throughout the home, transport, and even in clothing, that have embedded processing power and which tap energy from their environment. General purpose smart dust (see Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky) and eventually utility fog are advanced examples, but they're further up the curve.

These technologies might be that noticeable to a casual observer, but they would both have substantial effects on the way we live our lives.

 

[RJDiogenes]

I agree with RJDiogenes - I'm sick to death of the grunge look. In addition, the engineering section of the Enterprise should not look like the inside of a brewery. What a travesty.

Yeah, that was pretty ridiculous.

Another possibility is that one can look at some works as existing in their own universe or continuity, which allows them to have their dated concepts because their history isn't 100% the same as ours.

Exactly. Or even the laws of physics. Clearly, Star Trek, for example, exists in the a completely different universe. They have warp drive, time travel, artificial gravity-- all things that are unlikely in the extreme here-- and also phenomena like moons and asteroids that have Earth-normal gravity and nebulae as thick as pea-soup fog. It's like Steampunk or High Fantasy; you just take the parameters and work within them.

Sounds interesting. Maybe I should look this up.

"Marooned In Realtime" is a great story. It's a sequel to "The Peace War," which is pretty decent too, and they're both included in a book called Across Realtime.

I wouldn't say pop culture is stagnant-but I will say this. John Birmingham, in his Axis of Time books, has a character from 2021 reflecting that NOTHING in pop media gets thrown away since the advent of electronic recording because everything is important to somebody. So she has the Simpson's theme as her email alert and knows the words to Sympathy For the Devil. Such is the future-a mash-up of the past and present.

That's true to a degree, but still, most of what we see today-- the grungy sets, the leather costumes, the washed-out color palettes, et cetera-- are just the tropes of the 80s taken to the level of self parody.

 

[Caliburn24]

I want the future to look lived in. This does not mean it has to be gritty and dirty, but it has to look lived in. Age the props, scuff the shoes, add some graffiti, make it feel like a real place and not a movie set.

Also, any advanced technology needs to be integrated into the setting. If you have transporters like Star Trek think about how such things are going to effect building architecture for example. Or city planning.

And please, please, please include safety features. Don't have bridges and balconies without guard rails. Don't have high speed cars/ships/whatever without some sort of physical restraints.

 

[Mistral]

For a good feel on what we will look like in, say, 20 years I suggest ol' Vernor Vinge again. His book, Rainbow's End is, IMO, the clearest look at the near future you are liable to find. That, or Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

As for smart cars-Asimov wrote about that 50+ years ago in the short story "Sally" (1953). The long and short of it is, though, that unless a major breakthru is made in physical designs any personal vehicle from 2050 is going to strongly resemble a car as we know it. Clothes are going to go through fashion changes-but we'll still wear shirts and pants and shoes. Barring an unfortunate chemical/genetic accident causing world-wide baldness we'll still style our hair and probably use a comb to do so. My point is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. People like the comfort of familiarity and even though there may be more circuitry involved everyday objects would still be recognizable to our hypothetical time traveler well into the middle of this century, at least.

If you are interested in examining the ramifications of the other side of the coin, the whirlwind rush of change that is modern society, try reading Spider Robinson's short story "The Time Traveler". Now there's some food for thought.