Douglas Trumbull Quotes

There were IBM logos designed for the film, and there were IBM design consultants working with Kubrick on the layout of the controls and computer screens.

I became convinced that the whole essence of the computer revolution is interactivity. That was very early in my career. At the time I did that it was heresy.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

In designing hardware to be used every day, it was important to keep both the human aspects and the machine in mind. What looks good also often feels good.

I originally studied graphic design and video production. I had wanted to be a programmer - I loved development and coding - but it turned out that I really enjoyed doing the frontend more than backend development.

I am confident that we can do better than GUIs because the basic problem with them (and with the Linux and Unix interfaces) is that they ask a human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well. The question I asked myself is, given everything we know about how the human mind works, could we design a computer and computer software so that we can work with the least confusion and greatest efficiency?

Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.

I think everyone should learn how to code.

What makes a mockery of a lot of these 3D conversions, where they're shot in 2D and converted to 3D. Having laid a real 3D movie, you realize that it's right in the production design. You design sets that enhance the 3D and you design interactive elements, like the rain or smoke. If you're shooting 2D, you don't know about that.

A well-designed and humane interface does not have to be split into beginner and expert subsystems.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

For those who wish to stay and work in computer science or technology, fields badly in need of their services, let’s roll out the welcome mat.

The autodecrement is not magical.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is 'on paper.'

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

All change is in the screen.