I don't think that the appeal is just nostalgia though. Modern control rooms and equipment racks just don't have the pretty-looking hardware that the older ones do. Control rooms usually have big displays with network diagrams on them that aren't sexy anymore, along with a bunch of workstations. Equipment racks usually are dominated by LCDs and membrane switches that look a bit chintzy, no big pushbuttons in chromed bezels anymore.
Ugly but functional might be the way of the future!
Game controllers are the perfect example of ergonomically-tuned physical controls with sleek looks. And afaik the US military uses Xbox controllers in drone control or something like that.
Something like a braille-capable touchscreen would already be a great improvement (concept art: [1][2])
This is technically 2.5D, and 3D would be even better (imagine a screen which can grow a joystick!).
While 3D-shape-shifting screens don't seem to exist even in SciFi, 2.5D displays are already being worked on, and would be a huge step up.
[1] https://www.yankodesign.com/2017/01/26/touchscreen-how-about...
[2] https://www.popsci.com/new-touch-screen-design-could-display...
Being able to replace a physical station seems a great benefit in a warship.
It was a really good read!
I kept wondering a bit if RAF-2203 took some cues from the PT. Other RAF minivans seem to be obviously inspired by VW Type 2.
All design evokes something. Colours, font, margin and spacing, edges and borders - it all evokes some things that came before it more than others, and the relationship with the human body and its feeling of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, kinematics - whether controls are pointy or smooth, hard or soft, stiff or slick or springy, continuous or with detents - it all adds up to an aesthetic.
You can't help but have design. You know when things don't "feel" right. When something feels flimsy instead of solid; when it's haphazard instead of regular. And when the design is exceptionally poor, chaotic, that too is a design - a kind of mad, insane design, or primitive and naive, unskilled - it always evokes something.
Plainly false [1]{RUS}.
Reminds me of the infamous "There is no sex in the USSR!" blurb[2].
Well, that would be enough for ‘industrial design’ as a discipline—the question is whether ‘the product does not cause suffering from looking at it and touching it’ was considered a part of the criteria for ‘working’.
The ortholinear keyboard would be notable, if again it had any basis in reality aside from the ‘йцукенг’ Cyrillic layout—which however has punctuation cast away beyond reach.
It's still a mystery to me whether this country had actual industrial design in the Soviet era—I guess it should've had economic research at least. But Soviet industrial looks were mostly regarded as ‘ugly but functional’ by the folks.
IMO it's only now that pre-digital hardware looks appealing, through the nostalgia for ‘simpler times’. What with onscreen controls emulating bulky knobs, buttons and displays of e.g. hifi equipment and 80s' synths.