Can you even imagine how relaxing it would be to have the same interface to your systems, every day, with all the parts in one physical location and never moving? Learn it once, then nothing changes for years and years, or if it does it's usually adding on, not replacing or re-arranging existing stuff? Man, that would be nice.
Especially if the interface was designed for high performance (unlike most UX today).
One of my favorite was when I spent years starting to learn photojournalism on the side: the mechanics of using a camera is only a small part of it (it's mostly about understanding and conveying a story), but even at my student/amateur level, the muscle memory with pro DSLR and lenses was crazy-effective.
I even got a shot that happened only in an instant, unexpected, perceived in my peripheral vision, and the right camera body (I had 2 hanging from shoulders) was suddenly in my hands, viewfinder to my eye, aimed, zoomed in with my 70-200 focal length ring, focused (I might've even used the wheel to select which AF focus point, before half-pressing the shutter button), and snapped-- without consciously intending to do any of those things, so it all seemed to be instantaneous, and I got the shot of something as it was falling.
Had I only had a touchscreen phone/camera or a bottom-end DSLR (on which some brands intentionally cripple the UI, to avoid cannibalizing pro gear sales), I would've looked very dumb as I didn't get the shot.
By law a lot of motorcycle controls are standardized both to ensure sane controls (think suicide clutch) as well as standardization (1 down 4 up).
Riding a motorcycle involves all four of your limbs having a dedicated control (left arm clutch; right arm throttle and front break; left leg shifter; right leg rear break).
It is so satisfying having your body operate all of these controls without a conscious thought.
Exactly, these are all great things that we should be happy to have. Why would you prefer some clunky, old-fashioned mechanical controls on your motorbike instead of a slick, modern touchscreen that sometimes freezes up while it does a forced OTA update, even though you're driving in heavy traffic?
Do you happen to know if electric motorcycles are meaningfully diverging on these? Like how many EVs adopted single-pedal driving, are there e-motorcycle analogues?
I've never actually ridden any, but what I see is two directions.
Smaller ones (think 125cc equivalent or less) seem to have adopted the scooter layout, ie no pedal, only hand levers, possibly reversed (left front, right rear). I see a lot of those around Paris: https://vmotosoco.fr/gammes/tcwanderer
I would absolutely hate to have those changes. As GP says, it's paramount to not have to think about the controls on a motorcycle. I usually ride a "normal" motorbike, but I was given a scooter once when I took mine in for service. The weird brake lever layout (left front, riht rear) was surprising. "Fortunately", the brakes had next to no bite, so nothing bad happened when I squeezed the clutch, figuring I should change gears...
Anecdotally, for a somewhat "half-way model", Honda has ICE DCT models, which are normal motorcycles, but with robotized and automatic gearbox and clutches. They're using the classic layout, but, like with the Zero, there's no lever on the left hand (sometimes there's a parking brake, but the lever is way out), and no pedal for the left foot.
I'm in full agreement with you about the tactility benefits with a physical camera versus a smartphone.
I'm in a phase of life where I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing or even what I'm very good at. But I do have a camera and I can write passable amounts of code, so I've been preparing a website to host my work while I strongarm friends and family into taking pictures with me. Most of them have a nice phone with a good camera and so we often end up talking about what the benefits are of a dedicated set of camera hardware versus using a phone's camera. I like those discussions because it makes me think critically about my camera and why I'm using it.
The physical inputs and muscle-memory laden experience is what I've kept relying on as justification and it's nice to hear I'm not the only one. For those of us who have used guns, it almost feels like holding a rifle. The entire process is subconscious and the more I use it the faster I become, as well as the more finely-tuned I can set up the camera during that subconscious movement. It equips me to image things that, if constrained by time or scene stability, I straight up would not be able to do with a phone camera.
There's also the social benefit that comes with it. I've found that when I'm using my camera and rapidly fiddling with controls and settings, people around me get the sense that I am a professional (I'm not) who knows what he is doing (I don't). "Everyone" has a phone so those "every" are common to see holding up a flat slab to a scene but dedicated camera users are increasingly rare. My tools and my physical control over them grants me this silly air of authority. And honestly that authority presents me with fresh opportunities for impromptu shots; just recently I was at a live music event and started wandering into places and standing on things to get the angles I wanted. Nobody said a word to me, nor did I think twice about doing it. We all kind of understood, "that guy has a camera and he's using it well. I suppose we should let him work". Kind of interesting.
I don't know about "professional", but what I've also found is that if you want someone to hold a pose, they're much less likely to tire and stop if you take ages to fiddle with your smartphone.
> Especially if the interface was designed for high performance (unlike most UX today).
Analogue gauges are amazing for real-time feedback, for example my espresso machine needle will oscillate wildly at the vibratory pump frequency if i don'tnt have the grind setting quite right. A digital sensor and display would average it out and be nowhere near as useful.
For the "f/8 and be there" philosophy of getting a usable shot at all, I agree with the simplicity of having a sensible default, and of course with the importance of being where the story is. In the digital era, and as a student/amateur who often kept the strobe in the bag, I'd modify that to "f/4 and be there".
f/4 with autofocus, aperture-priority automatic exposure, ISO 400 gave great images, with faster exposure (less likely to have motion blur when I didn't want it, and faster bursts, more forgiving of lower light) and shallower depth-of-field (for making the subject pop).
(I think of f/8 as being near hyperfocal distance for having anything in field of view in focus, and probably near an image quality sweet spot of the lens, but also often being slow for non-studio use unless you were using a strobe.)
Said someone who only takes pictures in broad daylight. Even with modern tech and 100 watt light bulbs, you get enough motion blur and/or noise to ruin most shots indoors. With film that maxed out at ISO 800 and enlarger as the only postprocessing tool, forget it.
I used to be an editor in an online digital video suite. All real time and all dedicated controls. GVG Kadenza, Abekas and Accom digital disk recorders, D1 and digi-beta, GVG 141 edit controller. Rarely even looked at the controls, could adjust two or more parameters simultaneously—super important, especially when the parameters affected each other as they were adjusted. Muscle memory ruled—like playing a piano. Plus the physical motion, flying through the settings, looked impressive to the clients and, at those rates which could reach several hundred dollars an hour, that performance, the show, was important.
One if the aspects I loved about flying more basic planes. You can master the controls, and then you just know that interface forever.
Another reason is that it is discrete, and feedback is obvious. I flip a switch, it goes thonk, and it is in a new physical state. This is where I think modern UX fails the most often. Did I click it? Did it work? Was that a button at all? Is this toggle on or off?
Use boring software. Software that releases every few months instead of weeks or even days. Software that is well documented and has an active supportive community.
I've had an experience like this recently in Java. One of the most storied and heinous areas of Java development: so-called "web services." This is the whole SOAP+WSDL hell that did incalculable damage to the Java language and can be credited with the rise of REST as a sane alternative.
I had a system I needed to integrate into a workflow engine. I looked at the available interfaces and, noticing that the SOAP API was the most feature complete of the bunch, I figured I'd give it a try.
Guess what; no one is iterating on this stuff anymore. The standards specifications quit changing years ago so the targets aren't moving. The libraries are feature complete, solid and efficient and only infrequent bug fixes are appearing now. It works wonderfully.
So now you can grab a WSDL, stick on the resource path, add a code generation step to the build and it all "just works." The endless backflips and somersaults it took to get this stuff working back in the day have been evolved out of the stack and we're left with simple, type-safe RPC over HTTP, which is all most people ever really wanted.
I've been a programmer long enough to see things being reinvented over and over again, just under a different name or written in a different language, or now it's "cloud native" and "serverless" and "ready for microservices". The longer I witness this cycle of reinvention the more annoyed I become by it. It's crazy to think that all the work we did in the 80's, 90's and 00's is just thrown away like that, only for those same things to be reinvented and implemented from scratch again with all the experience from the previous iteration lost. Programmers seem to behave much more like the fashion industry than anything else.
Works when you're picking the software. Less so in most companies where you spend 75% of your time interacting with half-broken, constantly-changing, barely-interoperable programs and web-services that someone else chose.
I can see it working for certain industries, but overall we need digital systems too. I work in manufacturing (biotech); everything we do uses a automated recipe, and there are only a handful of systems where we need an operator to directly interact with a UI to make stuff happen.
Boring is best where the risk of nuclear meltdown is concerned, but I would expect operating the same system every day for years to be pretty boring vs. engineering changes to systems.
I was just thinking the same thing! It seems so peaceful. Now it’s a bunch of flat panel screens with brash colors and a flood of information, animation and menu diving.
AWS should sell physical control panels. This knob is for memory, that one is for CPU. Hit that button to scale up… no not that one!!
Music synthesizers are an example. People still flock to hardware synths even though software is as good sonically and way more flexible. Limitations are good. Twisting knobs is satisfying.
I've operated in boiler room offices at large plants for almost 40 years, the mimic panel is a very valuable tool. With miles of piping carrying water and steam for various reasons, the panels help keep it all straight in your mind.
These panels are in hospitals, chemical plants, data centers, Navy ships and subs and many other places similar to where I work. I can't imagine what it feels like to work in a nuke facility. I do work with some men who worked on subs, their training was astounding.
The recreation of the control room in HBO's Chernobyl drama was
impressive. Presumably it was fairly accurate/authentic - but also
it's simplicity and explicit use during shots in the drama as a filmic
device to explain the quite technically complex plot was amazing.
From the dials, meters and warning lights made it all come alive.
I was maintaining instrumentation is similar control rooms. The man behind panel. Petrochemical industry, recorders, indicators, alarms, tranducers, pneum. controllers. Mix of pneumatic and electronic technology (thermionic valves mostly). US technology from 50's/60's and it looked the same like this. Remember Taylor 700T chopper stabilized thermocouple transducer, Honeywell, Fisher instrumentation...
No. Honeywell TDC's were in other plants - polyethylene, polystyrene.
This was old olefin plant. Not any kind of control logic, no computers, no scada. Just control loops for flow, presssure, temperature on the field - with control room indications, and/or PI/PID controllers in the control room. So we could adjust PID loops from control rooms.
And most important - there was man in the middle, and his logic!
Later I lead maintenance on steam generation plant, and there we also didn't have any visualization of process, just bunch of logic cards in two racks, cards full of CMOS 4000 IC! I loved it. We searched for logic faults looking at the bad xeroxed paper logic circuit schematics!! Checking inputs from field, and deducing why output is not ok, and some valve not actuating. Changing IC's, or repairing cold junctions. People knowing chemical proccess were crucial!
Can you imagine perfectly stable operational amplifier made with thermionic valves (tubes), ECC81, ECC82, ECC83. Amplifying DC millivolts to stable volts and converting them to pressure 3 - 15 psi, because intrinsic safety circuits were not possible at that time. 4-20mA came later.
Here are some pictures of a General Railway Signal NX system board, for train dispatching.[1] This was the first intelligent user interface. From 1924.
Previous systems had "interlocking", to prevent collisions. Early systems had big levers and mechanical bars and blocks to prevent setting up conflicting routes. Signals had to be set to stop on all ways into a switch before you could throw the switch. Later systems added train detection, and you couldn't physically move the levers if a train was in the way.
But this just prevented errors. It didn't help with the job. NX (for eNtry eXit) was the next step. When a train was approaching an interlocking (a set of switches and tracks under one controller), lights on the board showed train presence. The dispatcher then pushed a button ahead of the train, indicating that they wanted to dispatch the train coming in on that track.
That's when the magic happened. Lights then lit up on all the tracks where it was possible to exit the interlocking. This took into account conflicting routes already set and trains already present. The system routed around conflicting traffic if possible. Only the reachable exits lit up.
Then the dispatcher would push one of the lit exit lights, and the system took over. All the un-selected exit lights went out. The selected route lit up and was locked in. Commands were sent out to the switches along the route to physically move the switches. Lights flashed on the board as the switches moved, and when contacts at the switch had verified that the switch was in the correct position and locked, the flashing stopped. Then, with all switches set and locked, the signals changed to allow the train to proceed.
As the train passed through, the track segments and switches behind it were released and could be used for other traffic. All automatically.
This system was so good there are still working installations, a century later.
I have posted this here before but I had the opportunity to live on Soviet/Russian icebreakers in the arctic for a period of time. Here's a small snippet of my photos, including of the control panels in the engine room and in the ship's bridge. Such an interesting perspective on utilitarianism:
Id love to know what Edward Tufte thinks of this sort of design. I get very strong small-multiples vibes from seeing all those needle-style meters, and I assume, given the stakes, that the Soviets applied some psychology and human information design principles to them. Or maybe they just hacked it together, who knows.
The biggest problem with the Soviet Union was Brezhnev not being able to keep with his economic reforms after 1974.
Seeing Russia nowadays it is sometimes hard to believe that once they were the second economy in the world, before being removed from this post by Japan.
Had they enacted Chinese style reforms they could have avoided the whole disastrous 90s
Even with market reforms, I think they would have fallen victim to the addiction to energy revenues that's poisoned so many energy exporting economies. Breeds corruption, croneyism, and discourages investment in other industries.
They tried. Gorbachev wanted to turn Russia into another Sweden. Bush the Elder convinced the World Bank not to loan to them unless they agreed to impose neoliberal economic policies. Which led to oligarchy. And then Putin.
What is "And then Putin" supposed to mean? Perhaps you mean that Mr. Putin is implementing Gorbachev's goal of "turning Russia into another Sweden", which was blocked by Bush the Elder and the collective west's looting of Russia in the post-Soviet period?
My dad hates Mr. Putin because the television tells him Putin is a war criminal.
Other sources say Mr. Putin is the moderate who keeps the extremists in the Kremlin under control. That Russia fought in Ukraine with 9 fingers tied behind its back until it realized that there was no way to get the West to respect Russia's red line of Ukraine not being admitted into NATO. Someone on twitter said Russia's transition from 'preserve Ukraine's Soviet-era infrastructure' to 'destroy NATO's proxy army' was in September [0]. Russia didn't gave Ukraine's power grid the "shock and awe" treatment until November.
"[Putin] was a Lt. Col doing a mundane job in Dresden, Germany when the wall came down. He came back to St. Petersburg, Unemployed. He drove a taxi for a while. Got a job with Mayor Sochek's office, and anybody who dealt with him... said he was the most honest man he ever dealt with. ... He inherited a nation that had just undergone a decade of devastation, brought on by the west. But did he hate the west? No. He actually started his first years in office, trying to court the west, trying to come up with normalcy in economic relations. ... 2007 speech to the Munich security conference... The reality that the west is anti-Russia." Scott Riter, https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1583749384486891520 (emphasis added)
"Vladimir Putin is a Russian patriot, a moderate European-leaning leader who rescued Russia from the abyss. in Russia, he is not considered charismatic. He is supported because of Russia's economic and spiritual recovery. The Neocons hate Putin because they hate Russia." - https://twitter.com/DietHeartNews/status/1605275170138214425
Your "source" is calling Zelensky "the Imperial Puppet" and "comedian"[0], which makes me think it's probably even more biased towards Russia than western media are towards Ukraine.
My understanding is Ukraine was ready to negotiate with Russia by April 2022. Boris Johnson, the former UK prime minister, went to visit [0] around April 9 2022. Thenceforth Zelensky seems to have understood that Ukraine was to fight to the last Ukrainian.
What actually happened is Ukraine retook Bucha and then when Ukraine saw what Russians did k Bucha they decided negotiations were over.
I don’t blame them either why would you negotiate with the army that’s raping and torturing your civilians?.
There’s no point to negotiation with Russia anyway they don’t abide by international agreements unless it benefits them and even they may break them later.
Any peace outside of an absolute Russian defeat would be temporary and just allow Russia to invade again later.
> Thenceforth Zelensky seems to have understood that Ukraine was to fight
You've given no evidence or argument to back up this implied conspiratorial causality. The simplest explanation is that Johnson told Zelensky that if Ukraine wanted to fight, they would have the support of the UK and the greater West.
Also, how hard is it to imagine that a country that had been subjugated by Russia up until a single generation ago, knows the horrors of such and will do everything possible to avoid ending up there again? The further east you go into previously Soviet countries, the more support there is for Ukraine. If this really were a "both sides" issue, you'd expect the exact opposite.
The hallmark of central planning is that the more technology advances, the more your economy falls apart due to the impossibility of calculating every detail centrally. Good read on the subject:
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/155597...
There is a Star Trek bridge vibe to those circular control rooms.
I wonder if there's a tradeoff point where if you have less than some number of people, the circular design is more optimal to enable communications between people and access to data.
At some point with more people (and more data) it becomes untenable to keep the circular design and you go more linear, such as the NASA mission control room.
The most visually appealing part is the use of colours that you wouldn’t expect on an industrial control panel.
The first picture shows a shade of blue, as well as red and yellow symbols for whatever they might mean.
Also, approximately fifteen images down shows a switch control panel for a two-platform, triple-track Moscow Metro station (Полежаевская) that was intended to have a branch line, but mothballed due to future ridership projections.
Always felt bad when replacing these old control rooms, there is a certain beauty and elegance to their design that is missing in modern HMIs.
This sort of color coding is common in industrial settings and definitely was on panelboards of the era. It would be really interesting if the color coding seen here in any way aligns with ANSI/ASME A13.1.
Mimic controls are so possible in VR with almost unlimited enhancements. I know they have existing simulators where you stand at a mock control desk in a headset running test cases, but, at some point, it will just make sense to use XR enhanced 3D control centers.
I’m not sure what these rooms control, but it’s possible the control room is simply part of a greater facility that has a mandate for this. Which makes sense, since there’s something to control here that may be more sensitive / dangerous than the control room itself.
Nuclear power plant. Workers would wear those uniforms while on site so that they don't track any stray radioactive particles home on their street clothes.
Slightly different environment, but my dad was a service engineer in the 1960-1980s mainly working on coin counting equipment. His workwear for customer sites was a white coat over his suit. That was fairly normal back then so probably kept to traditions in industry. I've nothing to add about the hat though.
I've not got a photo of him at work, but this is him wearing one of his old & dirty coats after he retired.
Probably because nuclear plant workers were thought of as lab workers, and those wore these uniforms as well. Not sure if it was also a precaution against hair and threads falling into critical equipment.
Not Soviet per se... Londoners can visit Battersea Power Station Control Room B. It's a rather similar aesthetic. Just ask at the bar to have a look and they'll let you through a little gate.
Space ambiance! this is one topic that really interests me - how spaces create psychological states that are unique and satisfying.
there is a similar set of spaces - liminal spaces (google image search this term to see examples) - these are similar spaces - like corridors which have a unique feel.
We still have control rooms like this (I think in use) in Tasmania Australia. They sometimes have open days for our Hydro Power Plants, and they are some of the most interesting tours around. The one I visited was like using a time machine to travel back to the age of Art Deco. Obviously some more modern control systems have been added, but the Art Deco vibe is still there!
I was lucky enough to tour a lot of hydroelectric dams around the western US as a child, thanks to frequent roadtrips and a dad who could talk his way into nearly any place, and a more permissive security culture[1]. As you say, a lot of the control rooms are beautiful in a certain functional way.
I worked at a fusion company and would have loved to be involved in the control room design. People generally aren't interested in designing rooms like this. People are happy with just big monitors at desks likely displaying hard to interact with interfaces that are ever changing. One engineer even wanted to install physical barriers to keep people away from stations.
I'd say most of us with technical minds will do that.
Problem is, figuring out most of them depends on having the thorough user manual at hand to read each gauge or button's purpose; AND understanding what that purpose means, which depends on having an engineering education from the same era when they were built.
I'm not sure you need the manual and an education from that era. When I've read everything I can find about a subject it's surprising how much you can understand. The challenges are often that so many of the systems are kinda uninteresting (gland steam pressure on a turbogenerator for example), only used in specific circumstances (fire control panels) or duplicated (ship controls often have 4+ controls which turn the azipods, not to mention the repeated controls on the bridge wings).
The last time I deducted too much time to this endeavour I started to understand the ballast controls on a O-class submarine...
It's not nearly enough rods for an RBMK. Those were huge. And they had nothing outside the circle. Probably another type of nuclear facility. Maybe a medical isotope reactor?
The second last photo looks like an RBMK or at least something that size.
If you click on the picture it says it's the Kola nuclear power plant, which is a VVER-440 reactor. Searching for other VVER pictures, e.g.[1], confirms that they match.
So it's probably nuclear plant control console and I'm guessing nuclear fuel rods are represented by a dot inside the "sun" and rods themselves are suspended in some sort of a circular enclosure
Does anyone have any references to research or studies discussing the design and approach of control rooms? Research on human factors, human machine interfaces, and cognitive load? Fro example, I assume the airplane and astronaut industries have thought about this a lot.
They’re amazing. I can’t imagine the process to ensure all the metrics are correct. Seems like you’d have to check every single little dial for accuracy. Insane considering there’s hundreds.
I assume there was one of these rooms for every reactor too, crazy.
There was an experiment that I forgot the origin of, but interesting nonetheless:
A hospital used some standardized table on print papers as a medical journal summary. Doctors were apparently very quick at extracting relevant information. Some software engineers came along, and designed a computer system. Instead of this big table, they decided to put the most relevant information and display it first, like a list. This reduced visual clutter, and most non-doctors could now read it better. However, the doctors took longer to parse it than before, and didn’t like the new system. And they were the primary user after all. It turned out that the doctors had memorized were everything was supposed to be. With the new system, there was no way of finding a specific piece of information quickly, even though the total amount was reduced.
The interesting thing here is that all solutions have hidden features, that are useful but we don’t even know that it’s there even if (and perhaps especially if) we use it every day. It seems as if our brains are extremely capable of spatial memory. Of course, there are more such examples, for instance fine motor skills (how would you like a keyboard which rearranged the keys depending on their frequency of use?)
The reason why some of us find these control rooms almost soothing is precisely because modern technology have depraved us of these neglected features: things are in the same place, physical dials, everything is predictable.
This is closely related to my hate against anything “smart”. In adding features (sometimes for good reason) product managers and engineers don’t consider that they’re removing hidden features, often related to predictability, that are much more valuable than the features they added.
I agree it's really aesthetic (I love the circle arrangements with indicator lights occurring in several in them, I assume it's something reactor related). Are such control rooms still made today, or is it all digital screens?
