Imagine if the walls were thin resonant panels and every time the Captain says "make it so" it will reverberate and sound like a commandment from God !

You'd very likely want acoustic treatment. You'd hear the command from the direction it was given in, not bouncing around, echoing, and interfering with itself.

There's probably a practical set-design aspect to this. The acoustic tile as backdrop also makes a better sound stage, I would think.

I'd argue that TNG embodies your guess in many ways - many of the corridor and living area sets look like relatively normal, comfortable spaces. The computer is exactly that sublime technology - it's there when they need it (through a wake word) but otherwise completely invisible.

SciFi has to be the laziest aesthetic in existence. Oh your color scheme is grey-blue? Because of muh tech? How very cerebral and rational.

I think with future technology designers almost always overshoot on capabilities and undershoot with UX. The former is very easy to get pie-in-the-sky about and ignore limitations, while the latter you often only can improve with experience. Honestly even if you are designing couch cushions I think it is hard to hit 'different' and 'looks good on camera' without dipping into 'wildly impractical'.

If you consider a TNG tricorder, it is a magical device with 600 different functions, but to use it looks more awkward than even a 1st gen iphone. Definitely designed for the camera's eye first.

My only beef with Foundation, is calling it Foundation.

When I watched the LOTRs movies, I recalled several saying that it diverged from the books. And sure, it did. It had to. You cannot convert mediums and not have change. Yet the easy way to conceptualize it, is that you're listening to two different people's telling of the same tale.

Both people will perceive the world as a different place, will even be standing in different places during events, may not have been at all events, and so on. Once that's in the pocket, a movie such as LOTR does quite well I think. It captures what it should.

But move to Foundation, and I really have no idea what book anyone read. I feel that someone read the books, and wrote a 1000 word summary of it... then someone used that to write the scripts, which was heavily edited. Massive, vastly important concepts are completely dropped from Foundation. It's not even remotely the same story.

Again, it's not bad. I just hate they stole the name, and character names.

The reason I'm on about this, is that the people designing sets are typically "touchy feely" types, which is of course fine. However often these types have a really hard time with static, unchanging facts or things, very specific details, and caring about function over form. This of course can extend to world building by an artist, as opposed to a sci-fi author.

Here's one example... in the books the Empire had 25 million planets. In the series it's under 10k galaxy wide. There's no real reason for the change, other than "don't care" or "Oooh, that's a confusing number". Even the size of the galaxy was off in series 1.

So when it comes to sets? Bear in mind these people think "Ooooh, space!" and go into a flutter of excited re-design. They're not approaching it from an intellectual perspective, but instead from emotion. And space is strange, and cold, and blah blah.

Perhaps I'm unkind, I've met artist types which were more cognitive of their art. Sometimes. When they were drunk.

I have a theory that it is a lack of artifacts/detail. Take most living or working environments from the present or past, and you'll see a lot of "things" adorning walls or placed on furniture, some accumulated over years of occupation and use. Sets of non-sci-fi shows or movies can use the real world as a reference and replicate these environments. When you do it for sci-fi shows, set designers probably stop when it starts looking "good enough", or they overdo it with details such as flashing lights or textures. I recall the Battlestar Galactica CIC being an exception.

> even my highly regarded Expanse, which avoids a lot of inaccuracies usually, is not innocent here.

I can forgive a "hexagon everything", but The Expanse has these transparent displays and low contrast holograms, which really get me upset. I mean it's just obviously idiotic and absolutely wouldn't be a thing.

Then again, my iPhone looks and feels almost exactly the same front and back, save for the LED, which results in me tapping the back's decorative glass panel several times a day, before I realize it's not the display. A real-world, omnipresent design choice nearly as idiotic.

TNG was produced in the eighties and set centuries into the future. Given the technology, budget, and foresight available at the time, what they produced did sufficiently convey "future spaceship" in a way that was comfortable and relatable to (then) contemporary audiences.

TNG is one of the most tastefully done, IMO. The Expanse is only good because it's set in the immediate future with technology only slightly more advanced than today. But also the technology, materials, and SciFi corpus is so advanced now that it's just as easy to create an extremely convincing 2050's set as it is a 3050's set. Today's space opera is so incredibly egregious. What is the ratio of lens flares in a single modern trek movie compared to all 20th century trek? The Expanse definitely suffers from this kind of overproduction when you look closer, but because it's so close into the future we tend to overlook a lot.

ST: Enterprise did this extremely well, IMO, and for the same reason as The Expanse. It's in the immediate future and built around contemporary technology. Personally I adore the horrendous passive matrix LCDs everywhere in that show. It just adds to the scrappiness of Earth's first exploration ship.

I’ve always loved behind the scenes for sci-fi set designs and ship building. Kit bashing, repurposing junk yard items, painted container lid wall plating, etc. always forced me to look and think differently about everyday items. I can’t help but lament the loss of the constraint-drive emergent soul/feel of these “worlds” as CGI backgrounds and/or movie budgets applied to TV series set design (e.g. ST:SNW, ST:PIC, etc). With that said, Andor did show how high budget physical set designs can significantly contribute to world building.

I only noticed it because I hang out with A/V people. It was nice to find this page and have it not just confirmed but fully detailed. Babylon 5 does this a lot too.

I was prepared for a chair, not..... _that._

I revisit this chair list every now and then, especially during a rewatch of a series.

Worf’s chair always stood out to me as a life goal when the series aired. I settled for a Stokke high chair for my kid.

That reminds me somehow that both DS9 and B5 used same triangle-shaped pillows. Guess you can't have anything more "alien"...