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.
I was going to say something similar. The panels do look nice but don't seem much different than those of the West pre-digital era. I seem to recall that the nuclear ice breakers were a point of pride for the USSR, so it's likely that the panels received an above-average level of attention and are atypical.
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.
I've heard the US Navy is going away from screens; they were a bad idea, cause a lot of confusion and they're reverting back to analog switchgear because of the tactile feedback.
Ugly but functional might be the way of the future!
Touchscreens are just evil in any sort of physically involved environment, e.g. a car or even a kitchen stove. You can have ‘good-looking and functional’ (with physical controls too), but touchscreens in such a setup are rather ‘good-looking and dysfunctional’.
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.
I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional interface so one station could serve different functions, or functions could be moved between stations. Flexible, but confusing. I think the move is not to analog control, but back to single-purpose controls. Also, even if mechanical controls replace touchscreens, I'm sure that there will still be an optical encoder and field bus behind everything.
Why not physical analogue controls that are motorised like in some aeroplane controls. You can turn the dial, or the computer can turn the dial - and supposedly (737Max aside) allow physical control to override.
Being able to replace a physical station seems a great benefit in a warship.
I think of it this way: tactile controls for operation, read-only screens for situational awareness, touch or keyboard/mouse for configuration. Just don't put them on real-time critical paths.
There was no design,as a subject, in Soviet Union. It all fell under industrial engineering blanket and the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product. Architecture, however,was somewhat unique in this aspect,as there was more expressiveness in some works(non residential only,though).
This is not true. There was a whole institute doing industrial design: the Soviet Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Aesthetics [1].
That institute was also publishing a monthly "Technical Aesthetics" magazine from 1964 to 1992.
Ok,fair enough, looks like they were taking it more serious than I ever thought.
It's quite interesting that they called it Industrial Aesthetics.
Also,the Russian Wikipedia article is extremely detail on what was going on there:
https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%...
Oh heck, I've seen pics of the PT minivan back in the 90s, in the stash of either ‘Tech for the Youth’ or ‘Science and Life’. Its look has stuck with me as the embodiment of Soviet retrofuturism, which is what I actually remember as daring Soviet tech design.
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.
I don't think there's any such thing as "no design" (though I understand you to mean the academic subject).
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.
I meant it as an academic subject. In terms of colour,shape,form, function,and other,so called design properties, were well understood, however not always applied, especially in consumer products.
> the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product
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’.
Seen that, yeah. Alas it has an obvious flair of a ‘photoshop design’ with no connection to any engineering work.
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.