Chris Noessel

Gorgeous Catastrophic

2015

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About this talk

Through the book Make it So (Rosenfeld Media, 2012) and scifiinterfaces.com, Chris has spent years meticulously tracing the lines of influence between designs in sci-fi and the real world. And yes, there are clearly influences. But that does not mean that design in the real world should take its marching orders from sci-fi. Sure, a lot of it is jaw-droppingly beautiful. But some of those same, lovely designs—if implemented—would quickly result in the “usability problems” of severed limbs, munitions craters, mangled bodies, and even the plain old end of the world. Join Chris as he deconstructs enough examples to make us deeply, deeply wary of fetishizing them, and approach sci-fi interfaces with a critical (and still intact) eye.

About Chris Noessel

In his day job at Cooper, Christopher designs products and services for a variety of domains, including health, financial, and consumer; as well as teaching, speaking, and evangelising design internationally. Prior experience includes developing kiosks for museums, helping to visualise the future of counter-terrorism, building prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designing telehealth.

His spidey-sense goes off semi-randomly, leading him to speak about a range of things including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related technologies, free-range learning, generative randomness, and designing for the future.

He is co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Rosenfeld Media 2012), and the force behind the blog scifiinterfaces.com.