Futurism and Star Trek control panels

[beatrice_otter]

I have always thought that TNG and all Trek shows of that era use touchscreens because it was the "futuristic and cool" design aesthetic at the time.

But Mike Okuda says otherwise. He says it was a cost measure. If you are making a control panel with physical switches, that costs a lot to manufacture per square inch of panel. The absolute cheapest way to do a control panel is to have a sheet of plexiglass with a graphic sheet behind it, and a small backlight behind that. So that was what they went with, and the futuristic look was just a bonus.

Which then made the Enterprise show's control panels cost a lot more, because they had to be physical toggles and buttons. Like, at least 3x more expensive. Even with cutting corners! Like, a lot of the "buttons" were not actually buttons, they were just little stick-on rubber doo-dads, like you stick on the bottom of furniture so it doesn't scratch the floor.

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Comments

[genarti]

Oh fascinating! That does make total sense, though.

[beatrice_otter]

I know! He said it and it was immediately obvious that he was right, but it was so counter to the assumption everyone makes that it was surprising.

I was also amused by his story about the design ethos changes for ENT. They said, "we want everything to look different, can you do a different style?" And he said "Sure. But you have to understand, every design choice I make, I choose the way that will be cheapest to do. If you want to do it differently, it's going to cost more." And they said that was fine. And then when the estimates started coming in they threw a fit over the cost.

[melannen]

Coincidentally that's also why so many modern things use touchscreens! It's become easier and cheaper to stick in an off-the-shelf touchscreen and load it with buggy software than to have to pay people to design and assemble physical controls, even in situation where the physical controls make much more sense.

(and, of course, even easier to just stick in a generic mini wifi adapter, make your users download an app, and not bother with any control surfaces at all. Star Trek when.)

[axolotls]

I didn't know that!

And re: the original post, makes a lot of sense about why the screens in Trek are like that now.