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Hello there, shiny dumb design.

As I type this, I’m using a future is now toy and feeling very fakey futurish. Watching The Fifth Element in one window, sureefsearching in another, and typing this in a third. And to think back in the late Eighties I couldn’t see a need for a computer to do a bunch of different things at once. Now I use a phone that’s a bit of a unitasker but can do all these tasks (not in tandem – this generation).

So shiny dumb designs in the future. Transparent plasti-paper, printed in dark ink. Thirteen and a half minutes into this movie, the President is reading one in a room that has a dark palette. Wrong. Not readable, without a tiny bit of glow or translucency to separate it from the ambient environment. Later on, Dallas is sent a letter on the same paper, but in a a whitish envelope (paper) that makes it easier to read, though the plasti-paper is flashed around for the camera.

I’m sure that reusable paper is a common everyday item in the future; advances in electrostatically charged paper have been made, and the ebook wars rage on. I can see a combination of both coming to pass; maybe not as light and functional as a capture print (Serenity), but a home or commercially reusable standard, a bit less intensive than the older reclamation processes of parchment.

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  1. […] do these “almost future” movies. But again, they’ve not bothered with any sort of user interface design – all of the intended users of this powerful relativity laser know what buttons to hit. All […]

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