I love this website. It is a throwback to the old internet I grew up with. It has it all. Packed with esoteric information gathered and curated by a passionate group. Designed for desktop only with its own unique aesthetic. Not covered with ads and cookie banners and newsletter popups. I remember spending many evenings exploring such things at 33.6kbps.
On topic: I have watched every episode on TNG more than once and never noticed this. How embarrassing!
I only noticed it because I hang out with A/V people. It was nice to find this page and have it not just confirmed but fully detailed. Babylon 5 does this a lot too.
My favorite is the chairs in TNG. All that futuristic looking seating is something you can actually buy! Some of them actually look pretty comfortable. I've always wanted a Stokke Ekstrem
I get the vibe but is that really what you'd want on deck? I can't imagine giving a command and having it be ignored because it didn't bounce back to the people behind you.
You'd very likely want acoustic treatment. You'd hear the command from the direction it was given in, not bouncing around, echoing, and interfering with itself.
There's probably a practical set-design aspect to this. The acoustic tile as backdrop also makes a better sound stage, I would think.
Imagine if the walls were thin resonant panels and every time the Captain says "make it so" it will reverberate and sound like a commandment from God !
I’ve always loved behind the scenes for sci-fi set designs and ship building. Kit bashing, repurposing junk yard items, painted container lid wall plating, etc. always forced me to look and think differently about everyday items. I can’t help but lament the loss of the constraint-drive emergent soul/feel of these “worlds” as CGI backgrounds and/or movie budgets applied to TV series set design (e.g. ST:SNW, ST:PIC, etc). With that said, Andor did show how high budget physical set designs can significantly contribute to world building.
Ex Astris Scientia covers much of that and it's really cool to see how many times they reused particular stuff.
Even set that screams it repurposes some real life elements sometimes gives better overall impression than CGI surroundings. I miss that craftsman work from years ago.
Doctor Who after return in 2005 up until 2010 didn't had a big budget and thus sets, props were cheaply done but that exactly worked IMO for overall charm of that show.
KYLE Hi, Brandon.
BRANDON No time for pleasantries, Kyle. We have a level five emergency. You still got the utility systems walk-through, right?
KYLE Yeah. I've got sectors one through twenty-eight. I think Hollister has the upper levels.
BRANDON Great. I'll get everybody on-line.
Kyle is the real hero of the film. There is probably a scenario where Earth is saved when Kyle realizes that an acoustic panel has been rotated by 90 degrees.
Can't find it now but there's a website that documents the use of Ikea furniture in Star Trek. I first started to notice when the courtroom lamps in TNG's Devil's Due were the same lamps as in my loft.
Looking at science fiction sets, I always wonder why they have to look so "spacey"; Foundation is a good concurrent example of this, but even my highly regarded Expanse, which avoids a lot of inaccuracies usually, is not innocent here. Irregularly shaped doors, flashy lights in useless places, patterned backgrounds, round halls, windows on spaceships, and so on.
I mean, I get it, I watch a space opera, it’s set in space. But why do the designers have to shove it in your face that much? My guess would be that the future rather features sublime technology that disappears into the background when not needed, environments designed for efficiency, not wasted space—especially on vessels.
I'd argue that TNG embodies your guess in many ways - many of the corridor and living area sets look like relatively normal, comfortable spaces. The computer is exactly that sublime technology - it's there when they need it (through a wake word) but otherwise completely invisible.
True, although I’d argue that the relative normalness is probably also a necessity due to TNG being a very long-running show, where you cannot devise bespoke design for every episode in an economical way.
Yet, I still find the textured blinky walls very immersion-breaking, for their artificial appearance. It’s nit-picking for sure; TNG did an amazing job at creating an interesting universe.
I’d just wish for some actually bold yet believable vision of the future.
My only beef with Foundation, is calling it Foundation.
When I watched the LOTRs movies, I recalled several saying that it diverged from the books. And sure, it did. It had to. You cannot convert mediums and not have change. Yet the easy way to conceptualize it, is that you're listening to two different people's telling of the same tale.
Both people will perceive the world as a different place, will even be standing in different places during events, may not have been at all events, and so on. Once that's in the pocket, a movie such as LOTR does quite well I think. It captures what it should.
But move to Foundation, and I really have no idea what book anyone read. I feel that someone read the books, and wrote a 1000 word summary of it... then someone used that to write the scripts, which was heavily edited. Massive, vastly important concepts are completely dropped from Foundation. It's not even remotely the same story.
Again, it's not bad. I just hate they stole the name, and character names.
The reason I'm on about this, is that the people designing sets are typically "touchy feely" types, which is of course fine. However often these types have a really hard time with static, unchanging facts or things, very specific details, and caring about function over form. This of course can extend to world building by an artist, as opposed to a sci-fi author.
Here's one example... in the books the Empire had 25 million planets. In the series it's under 10k galaxy wide. There's no real reason for the change, other than "don't care" or "Oooh, that's a confusing number". Even the size of the galaxy was off in series 1.
So when it comes to sets? Bear in mind these people think "Ooooh, space!" and go into a flutter of excited re-design. They're not approaching it from an intellectual perspective, but instead from emotion. And space is strange, and cold, and blah blah.
Perhaps I'm unkind, I've met artist types which were more cognitive of their art. Sometimes. When they were drunk.
I finished season two literally an hour ago. And have to say it's a pretty bad show overall. I love a few concepts like the generic dynasty. And the empire overall. But the typical sci-fi trope of people dying and then not really dying is so damn prevalent. I think I'm at 5 character deaths who aren't really dead. Then a few really bad actors (savor) and mediocre plotlines. I want to like it but can't get myself to continue.
> When I watched the LOTRs movies, I recalled several saying that it diverged from the books.
LOTR film trilogy was amazing - it was made in times when CGI was still more a complementary tool rather than foundation (sic) of the production that we're seeing today. The balance back then was just about right. Hobbit on the other hand felt cheaply done in many spots - CGI was way too obvious. IIRC McKellen really despised that he had to act alone on greenscreen in these films.
I have a theory that it is a lack of artifacts/detail. Take most living or working environments from the present or past, and you'll see a lot of "things" adorning walls or placed on furniture, some accumulated over years of occupation and use. Sets of non-sci-fi shows or movies can use the real world as a reference and replicate these environments. When you do it for sci-fi shows, set designers probably stop when it starts looking "good enough", or they overdo it with details such as flashing lights or textures. I recall the Battlestar Galactica CIC being an exception.
Interestingly, this is something the spaceships in Starfield (the Bethesda game) did get right: There are things scattered, photos on the walls, tools lying about, coffee cups on counters, and so on. It really looks like a living space, not a set piece designed to make a point.
TNG was produced in the eighties and set centuries into the future. Given the technology, budget, and foresight available at the time, what they produced did sufficiently convey "future spaceship" in a way that was comfortable and relatable to (then) contemporary audiences.
TNG is one of the most tastefully done, IMO. The Expanse is only good because it's set in the immediate future with technology only slightly more advanced than today. But also the technology, materials, and SciFi corpus is so advanced now that it's just as easy to create an extremely convincing 2050's set as it is a 3050's set. Today's space opera is so incredibly egregious. What is the ratio of lens flares in a single modern trek movie compared to all 20th century trek? The Expanse definitely suffers from this kind of overproduction when you look closer, but because it's so close into the future we tend to overlook a lot.
ST: Enterprise did this extremely well, IMO, and for the same reason as The Expanse. It's in the immediate future and built around contemporary technology. Personally I adore the horrendous passive matrix LCDs everywhere in that show. It just adds to the scrappiness of Earth's first exploration ship.
Expanse really loved set pieces designed to be stood around. In vehicles that are regularly 0g!
That big waist-high horizontal touchpanel is going to very hard to use when you have nowhere to anchor yourself. And accidentally bumping into it while floating through has got to be annoying.
I think with future technology designers almost always overshoot on capabilities and undershoot with UX. The former is very easy to get pie-in-the-sky about and ignore limitations, while the latter you often only can improve with experience. Honestly even if you are designing couch cushions I think it is hard to hit 'different' and 'looks good on camera' without dipping into 'wildly impractical'.
If you consider a TNG tricorder, it is a magical device with 600 different functions, but to use it looks more awkward than even a 1st gen iphone. Definitely designed for the camera's eye first.
I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to do semi-holographic interfaces like we eventually see in most sci-fi from the 2000s and on. Those tricorders make a lot more sense if you pretend there's a holographic readout hovering above it.
TOS era tricorders had a small TV in them and big chunky buttons you could see poor Ensign Ricky fiddling with before falling into the lava pit. LCARS just didn't work well with the tiny little displays of TNG tricorders.
> even my highly regarded Expanse, which avoids a lot of inaccuracies usually, is not innocent here.
I can forgive a "hexagon everything", but The Expanse has these transparent displays and low contrast holograms, which really get me upset. I mean it's just obviously idiotic and absolutely wouldn't be a thing.
Then again, my iPhone looks and feels almost exactly the same front and back, save for the LED, which results in me tapping the back's decorative glass panel several times a day, before I realize it's not the display. A real-world, omnipresent design choice nearly as idiotic.
> I can forgive a "hexagon everything", but The Expanse has these transparent displays and low contrast holograms,
One could attempt to be charitable and say that in-universe, the display's output is aimed at the eyes of the user, not where the audience is. You might be seeing a privacy shield, like we've had on computer monitors!
Maybe I’m biased, but I kind of get this choice as a deliberate one to avoid having characters obstructed by screens all the time. But the blinky lights, the illuminated doors, the angled irregular shapes everywhere? Like, no!
I mean, yeah, but you "getting it" as artistic choice is breaking the suspension of disbelief. And it's everywhere.
Other hard scifi masterpieces such as Children of Men are also guilty (seemingly just for the aesthetic). I think it gets me, because it invokes privacy/confidentiality irritation in me. More so, since a police detective is an important character, who is constantly sharing investigative information with everyone this way. I simply wish they did AR instead. It's all forgotten once they do their awesome gravity stuff, or casually show New York below sea level, which gets me giggly in excitement.
> But the blinky lights, the illuminated doors, the angled irregular shapes everywhere?
This reminds me of another common scifi thing in The Expanse... face illuminated helmets. Realistically, with the darkness of space all around, people would only see their own face reflection :D Maybe that's not just because the audience can see who's talking, but also because external visor reflections would complicate filming and CGI. I allow it, although I would have celebrated identifying marks, such as pictograms and colors, for going the extra mile. Would have enabled one more layer of faction idiosyncrasies, too.
It's not the colour scheme, it's the shapes and architecture. Everything is plastic and coded as either technology or efficiency. Straight lines, industrial curves, blinky lights, holographic panels or touch displays. Clean, shiny, geometric, emphasis on shape and space. Form follows function. No superfluous decoration. No dirt on the ground.
Textbook modernism.
The alternative is the industrial-warehouse-in-space Alien aesthetic - all unlit metal gantries and dripping chains - which is a different kind of efficiency. But still utilitarian.
When you get an organic incursion of veins, branches, or tendrils, it's either a self-contained Memory of Home arboretum, or a signifier of danger and a Very Bad Thing.
Compare the "realistically" dingy environment of Darkstar to the fancy space airline and orbital hotel sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Have you really looked at the insides of actual craft from NASA, military aircraft, military and commercial ships, or submarines? Purposeful, large facilities like hangars, factories, oil drilling platforms, or refineries? Smaller technical spaces like equipment rooms, scientific research labs, and medical imaging labs?
I think the designers are often imagining future tech spaces derived from these examples rather than luxury ocean liners, hotels, resorts, and executive meeting rooms. It isn't irrational to use those purposefully technical environments as setting for technologically-driven drama.
Star Trek NG was more of the cruise ship or hotel vibe as they tried to efficiently convey their utopian vision. They went with the militaristic or industrial vibe for contrasting environments they encountered in many episodes.
Tarkovsky's Solaris has a standard-ish aesthetic - white padded walls, round corridors with tech greeblies, round windows - and then adds a wood-panelled library in space.
On topic: I have watched every episode on TNG more than once and never noticed this. How embarrassing!