Astrid Bin

Where few designs have gone before: Lessons in design from Star Trek

During the pandemic I found myself at home with nothing to do, so my partner and I decided to find something to watch on Netflix that had a lot of episodes. We ended up watching the entirety of Star Trek.

Lots of things stood out to me on this rewatch, but the most glaring was that I hadn't noticed before that there are a lot of musical instruments in Star Trek, and I became really interested in who designed them. I could only find one instrument that had a design credit attached: The unnamed "Aldean instrument" from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in Season 1 Episode 17 (When the Bough Breaks), designed by production designer Andrew Probert. I found him online (his career is long and very influential), and I sent him an email asking about this instrument and how it came about. He responded and said he couldn't tell me much, but did very generously include in his reply a scan of his original design drawing. It was beautiful.

As soon as I saw that drawing, this instrument suddenly got even more fascinating. Not only because it's a work of speculative techno-fiction that expresses an alien culture and its values, but also because I realised that this is an instrument design process that, since it was based on imaginary technology, was completely unencumbered by the earthly realities of sound processing and digital sensing. I thought about my own design process, and how design decisions are always influenced by what the technology can (or can't) do: the size of the computer, its power requirements, its connectivity, availability of libraries, CPU capacity, processing speed, how it's powered, and how to amplify the sound it creates all impact what the instrument ends up looking like and doing, and my imagination is always in some way limited by the hard facts of these affordances and restrictions.

Imagine, I thought, not having to care about any of that when dreaming up an instrument - just make it up. At the design stage, imagine it's all possible. At the implementation stage, hold the imagined thing as most important, the must-have. What would that even feel like? What new approaches to problems would I have to adopt?

Recreating Andrew Probert's instrument was the perfect opportunity to experience the outcomes of an inverted design process, one in which an imagined world dictates what the technology has to do, instead of the affordances of the technology defining the bounds of imagination. In this talk I explain what I learned about the technology of today by recreating an instrument from an imagined future.