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32 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMBEDDED HISTORIAN’S NOTEBOOK
trial design aspect to them and a real pragmatism about how people interface with
the technology.”
“That speaks to what you were talking about earlier about simplicity and about
that need for groundedness.”
“It’s important for people to understand things straight away,” Greg pointed
out. “You want people to look at an object in a movie and just get it even if they
can’t explain why. There might be weeks and weeks of thought involved in some
object, but it should all work in two seconds of seeing it on screen—you immediately
know what it is and what’s it for and why it is there. Because ultimately, design
—illustrative design, sculptural design, and so on—is just storytelling. You are just
telling another part of the visual story. It’s obviously the part that we’re all fascinated
with. I was fascinated with it as a kid. I loved the design of Star Wars for instance
or anything like that.”
“Battlestar Galactica for me too,” I said. “There was always something about
Star Trek and the like that missed something for me, and I think part of it was it
didn’t feel real.”
“It doesn’t feel used.”
“Exactly,” I replied. “I got to talk to one of the guys who made the models for
Star Wars when I was covering the opening of a museum exhibit and he described
the aesthetic as ‘used universe.’”
“Yeah, I keep on saying it,” he said, “even though it’s not popular to use Star
Wars as a reference point anymore probably because it is over used and also because
the recent movies are more for kids now. But it’s still totally true. It did this
kind of epoch setting thing—the Millenium Falcon was a totally futuristic thing but
it felt like a rickety old piece of shit which is awesome, an awesome idea.”
“Because it’s so perfectly counter-intuitive,” I said. “The classic ideal of the
space ship is that it’s got to be badass gorgeous and perfect…”
“Well futuristic things don’t break, right?”
“Totally,” I laughed. “This is something my co-author, who’s a futurist, talks
about. It’s actually a big challenge for him in his work, because people tend to
imagine the future as this perfectly clean, smooth, seamless, clean-shaven thing
and the truth is that human beings just aren’t like that. It’s one of the big questions
behind this book: how do you build a future that is human, that human beings
can actually inhabit? The past has a place in that, you know? I think that people of
our generation, maybe people more broadly now, are strongly drawn to objects that
you can have a relationship with—that feel more like they’ve had human hands on
them. Objects that carry stories, history that you can relate to. The fact that the