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The Aesthetics of Technology: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}{{Cleanup|Ironically, this page is outdated, with lots of "now" and "recent" references to stuff a decade or more old. A few have been changed. Others still need it.}}
'''MOD NOTE: This page has been semi-protected so that only logged-in users can edit it.'''
'''The Aesthetics of Technology''' is a [[Common Fan Fallacies|Common Fan Fallacy]] which holds that if something ''looks'' more advanced, it ''is'' more advanced, according to the viewer's own personal standard.
The viewer's own standard will, in these cases, not actually map directly to the viewer's own life-experience, but will be surprisingly weighted toward [[Zeerust]]: high technology is expected to look high-technological, so a visually complex special effect implies more technology than a visually simple special effect. [[Forbidden Planet|Robbie the Robot]] has lots of [[Blinkenlights|flashing lights]] and moving parts, so he looks more advanced than [[Star Trek: The Next Generation|Commander Data]], who just looks like a plain old human with a funny skin tone.
Obviously, there is a bit of strangeness here: a 1950s computer, with all its tubes, light bulbs and keyboards, ''looks'' vastly more technological and complicated than a plain, little, all white MacBook, even though the [[Everything Is an iPod In The Future|MacBook]] may have four processor cores literally ''millions'' of times more powerful than the old 1950s computer. This fallacy generally overlooks that one hallmark of advancing technology is the "comfort factor" we design in: something new and marvelous may well look all techno-, with exposed wires and flashing lights, but as technology advances ''even farther'', this techno-miracle will be refined until it can be given a form factor that doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. After all, it takes much more technological innovation to create the minimalist wallet-sized cellphones of today than to build a [[World War II]] army field phone. This is rather like complaining that a modern analogue watch which can set itself via radio link to an atomic clock is less advanced than a 70s calculator watch, because the latter has ''more buttons'' and a ''segmented display'' (this principle is the reason futuristic computers tend to feature [[Extreme Graphical Representation]]).
It also overlooks the way design aesthetics change over time, totally independent of technology. In the 1950s, people thought that
In general, as the "future" becomes the present for us folks in the real world, the miracles and advances tend to look not-quite so flashy as people in the past imagined them. Even if they change our lives enormously, they tend to do it in such a subtle way that you might not even notice by looking. The newest Boeing 747's look nearly identical to ones built in the 1970s but they're far more advanced inside. Some modern family cars are quicker than vintage sports cars, but they don't ''look'' as fast. A 2009 Dodge Challenger features all sorts of electronic pizazz such as cruise control, traction controls, computer-controlled engine, side airbags, GPS, voice recognition and whatnot, but outside it looks like a modernized 1970 Challenger. Your modern office building using modern building techniques might not need flying buttresses to hold it up, and it may indeed look a little different from the office buildings of a hundred years ago (it might even be a modern construction built behind a 19th century façade!), but it's not an organic-looking chrome spire seven miles tall with pneumatic tubes instead of elevators. We could probably build them that way, but we don't, because that's neither practical nor what our design aesthetics call for ([[wikipedia:Burj Khalifa|outside of Dubai]], anyway).
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{{examples}}
== Fan
* In ''[[Aeon Entelechy Evangelion]]'' we have the New Earth Government Army which uses utilitarian designs for its mecha. And then we have the Loyalist Nazzadi with their sleek and smooth mecha, surpassed only by their elite with even sleeker and smoother mecha.
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== Literature ==
* The ''[[Revelation Space]]'' universe created by Alastair Reynolds [[Hand Wave
* In ''[[War of the Worlds]]'' by [[H. G. Wells]], originally published in 1898, the narrator and main protagonist is one of the first at the scene of the fallen 'meteor' which turns out to contain a space-going artificial cylinder. To open, the cylinder slowly ''unscrews'', the height of imagined spaceship door technology at the time, and evidence of the aliens' technological sophistication (from a late 19th Century perspective at least).
* In the ''[[
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