It's not specific to the Soviet world, any control room built before computers looks like that. The examples I'm familiar with is nuclear power plants from the 70s:
I'm sure their's plenty of other control rooms in the same style, for subways, water networks, electricity grid, train networks, scattered around the western world.
Very true. It reminds me of the aesthetic[1] of German musician Hainbach[2]'s studio.
He makes use of a lot of early test equipment. The look is very functional but not ugly. It's not colourful but everything is well made because it's made for professionals.
> It's not colourful but everything is well made because it's made for professionals.
Nuclear plants, planes, etc use colour so you can differentiate very quickly under pressure. Much easier to shout "THE RED BUTTON!!!" than "The second button five down from the left!"
Sorry to break a myth, but you'll never hear someone about “THE RED BUTTON ” in a nuclear control room. There's way too much buttons that happens to be red for that.
Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it will very rarely be orders, but instead description if what each of them are doing while following the safety procedure, to keep other crew members aware of what they're doing.
So no “Press that god damn red button!” but instead “I'm bypassing turbine through GCTA and moving to step 342.B.3”.
META: Make sure that your adblocker is set to 11 on that site.
In the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things[0], Norman has a photo of beer tap handles on control levers in a nuclear power plant control room. This was done, to differentiate two important handles.
I won’t link to the photo, because it’s on personal blogs, and I don’t want to hug anyone’s site to death.
A few years ago I listened to a seminar where a few real professional doctors discussed the hospital scenes in movies or TV shows. They mentioned that those dramatic and chaotic operation room scenes where the doctor yells commands with a loud voice look so fake to them. In a real operation room, everyone (including the doctor and the nurses) is highly trained, works in tandem calmly and efficiently -- there's never a need to raise voice.
The lessons of TMI have been learned though, the accident has been thoroughly investigated and that's the reason why it's now being discussed in class.
Of course but we're talking about vintage control room designs here, some of which predate that investigation, so it still seems relevant to point out.
AFAIK All of them have been retrofitted to take the lessons from TMI into account (I can't be sure about other countries, but in France it's definitely the case).
And more importantly, the process around how you're supposed to take information from the controls during a crisis has been completely rethought, negating the issues found during TMI investigations.
This is from Swedens Ågesta Nuclear Plant, the first in the country.
I don't really get why you'd need all the used floor space. That seems to really be the key difference from those early control rooms and more modern ones. The old ones had you walking around and the new ones are designed to keep you seated. Still, it seems like the old ones had an excessive amount of floor space.
I'm pretty sure it's just the old photo look (plus the fact that in the current version, part of the space have been colonized by computers, which kind of ruins the mood).
I think these control rooms were superior in some respects to modern software system observability.
- modelling the system rather than implementation (system status rather than many individual service statuses)
- supporting causal reasoning: the control flow on top means you can trace failure modes back, visually; software systems typically only model their own ontology, and you need to look somewhere else for the next abstraction down
- surface state first rather than time series; a pretty graph is nice to look at, but for actionability sometimes what you need is the flashing red light
- prioritize first-out indicator. In a complex system with lots of alerts, the most important diagnostic alert is often the first one - the rest are downstream and contribute to alert fatigue, despite them probably being more important business metrics
As always, big industrial control rooms look amazing. But wow, that way of showing ads is one of the worst I've ever seen. (I really do need adblock on mobile ig)
Gorgeous pictures, but I dislike the "chef hats" in the first image. It makes them seem less like top-notch scientists and more like short-order cooks.
Having worked on SCADA software in the past, I find the evolution of the control room UX fascinating.
You can see in these pictures, where every input and output is a real physical thing, just how much density of information was required for Operators to process. As we moved to computer screens representing the same, those original screens would represent these control room layouts faithfully (and you can understand why, training an operator must have taken ages; retraining is not palatable).
Over time, multiple “control rooms” coalesced into one room of computer screens with fewer operators and yet an exponential increase in information to process. So how on earth can a person keep track of it all? Intervene promptly when things go wrong? Determine what needs attention right now vs something that can wait? As a problem space, the seemingly simply world of designing SCADA UI is quite fascinating.
Has the required operating information increased exponentially? My sense is that computers lowered operating information density by merging multiple signals into fewer, more complex ones.
Each time I see beauty in old machinery I think about the recent IEEE article that started with something like "AI designs aren't limited by outdated concepts like simplicity and aesthetics." and remember that there is someone that goes to a museum and sees inefficiences and time wasted on unnecessary detail instead of inspiration.
I always wonder when I see a picture of a cockpit of an airplane how many meters there are. Don't know why they need so many, what meters do you need to fly a plane?
- here's Bugey, the oldest active nuclear plant in France: https://cdn-s-www.leprogres.fr/images/5A6732BE-29F9-43FA-806...
- And here's Dampierre, the second oldest, which I was lucky enough to visit: https://www.larep.fr/photoSRC/Gw--/centrale-nucleaire-indust...
I'm sure their's plenty of other control rooms in the same style, for subways, water networks, electricity grid, train networks, scattered around the western world.
He makes use of a lot of early test equipment. The look is very functional but not ugly. It's not colourful but everything is well made because it's made for professionals.
I see the same thing in mid-century BBC studios.
--
1. Which I love.
2. https://www.hainbachmusik.com/
Nuclear plants, planes, etc use colour so you can differentiate very quickly under pressure. Much easier to shout "THE RED BUTTON!!!" than "The second button five down from the left!"
Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it will very rarely be orders, but instead description if what each of them are doing while following the safety procedure, to keep other crew members aware of what they're doing.
So no “Press that god damn red button!” but instead “I'm bypassing turbine through GCTA and moving to step 342.B.3”.
In the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things[0], Norman has a photo of beer tap handles on control levers in a nuclear power plant control room. This was done, to differentiate two important handles.
I won’t link to the photo, because it’s on personal blogs, and I don’t want to hug anyone’s site to death.
The photo was removed, in the current version.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
To paraphrase, the Three Mile Island Disaster happened because the operators couldn't discern the right red light in a sea of other lights and noise.
https://uxdesign.cc/three-mile-island-how-bad-ux-led-to-a-nu...
And more importantly, the process around how you're supposed to take information from the controls during a crisis has been completely rethought, negating the issues found during TMI investigations.
This is from Swedens Ågesta Nuclear Plant, the first in the country.
I don't really get why you'd need all the used floor space. That seems to really be the key difference from those early control rooms and more modern ones. The old ones had you walking around and the new ones are designed to keep you seated. Still, it seems like the old ones had an excessive amount of floor space.
- modelling the system rather than implementation (system status rather than many individual service statuses)
- supporting causal reasoning: the control flow on top means you can trace failure modes back, visually; software systems typically only model their own ontology, and you need to look somewhere else for the next abstraction down
- surface state first rather than time series; a pretty graph is nice to look at, but for actionability sometimes what you need is the flashing red light
- prioritize first-out indicator. In a complex system with lots of alerts, the most important diagnostic alert is often the first one - the rest are downstream and contribute to alert fatigue, despite them probably being more important business metrics
Highly relevant: "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green"
Link: https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960 (3 months ago)
Previously,eg:
2022, 139 points, 99 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30581867
2020, 677 points, 268 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339
Etc
[0] https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960
You can see in these pictures, where every input and output is a real physical thing, just how much density of information was required for Operators to process. As we moved to computer screens representing the same, those original screens would represent these control room layouts faithfully (and you can understand why, training an operator must have taken ages; retraining is not palatable).
Over time, multiple “control rooms” coalesced into one room of computer screens with fewer operators and yet an exponential increase in information to process. So how on earth can a person keep track of it all? Intervene promptly when things go wrong? Determine what needs attention right now vs something that can wait? As a problem space, the seemingly simply world of designing SCADA UI is quite fascinating.