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.
