What the sci-fi thriller ‘Devs’ can teach us about design
A few moments after his initial encounter with the mysterious tech at the center of FX’s gripping miniseries Devs, the developer Sergei has to go vomit in the bathroom. It’s his first day on Devs, the enigmatic Silicon Valley corporation Amaya’s most exclusive division, and up until that moment, he has no idea what they even do. Instead of explaining Devs’ mission to Sergei, Amaya’s CEO Forest, played by Nic Offerman, simply lets him see for himself. The programmer’s gastrointestinal response makes it clear that the top-secret lab is cooking something up with world-shattering implications.
The Devs team’s quantum computing system is at the very center of the show’s questions about power and free will. And yet, the system itself is incredibly opaque — the viewer isn’t really meant to grasp it in any concrete conceptual or technical sense. It takes a few episodes before we get actual details about what it does, and for the most part, it appears in the show as an ominously humming room, the Devs lab. We are shown the system’s startling visual output at several points, visible through a projector in the lab, but have no sense of how these videos were generated. The viewer sees plenty of this brutalist space’s Odyssey 2001-style hardware gadgetry, but the system’s digital user interface — the very thing that generates these eerie videos— is as enigmatic as the Devs project itself, only visible in fleeting glimpses.
As someone who designs for screens, I was eager to see how this software would be depicted. If you were handed a brief to design a product that could tap into the secrets of the universe, what color palette would you use? Would you take leads from Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines or Google’s Material design system? Would you give rectangles rounded corners to evoke friendly organic shapes, or would you keep them sharp, stern, and geometrical? Would you try to mimic meatspace with skeuomorphism or incorporate more trendy flat design elements?
The show’s creators ended up mocking up the software in the style of an integrated developer environment (IDE.) Its design evokes popular developer tools used today such as Atom and VS Code, which are primarily used to format and deploy code.
The design of these IDEs, in turn, is heavily informed by the design of text-based command line interfaces (CLIs) such as DOS, CP/M, or BASIC. Before the consumer PC boom of the 80s and 90s, when the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) we still use today were first introduced, CLIs were the norm within computing. Users interfaced with them by typing commands into the program, rather than clicking, scrolling, dragging, and dropping.
While CLIs primarily catered to experts within science and mathematics, GUIs were considerably more usable for non-experts. The most common form of the GUI follows the WIMP paradigm, organized around the windows, icons, menus, and pointers. Users were familiar with how these elements worked offscreen, so when they first encountered their digital representation, they were able to recognize established design conventions in order to find their way around. The transition from CLIs to GUIs marks a transition from strictly technically-oriented computing to consumer-friendly, “pop” computing.
On the one hand, it’s not at all surprising that Sergei the developer is using what looks like an IDE: that’s what a real-life engineer would do, so it’s a realistic detail. On the other hand, Devs is creating a tool unlike anything else that has ever come before it. It is an epochal achievement, at the level of the steam engine or the mass-produced automobile. Shouldn’t it have a completely singular look? The Devs lab itself, which doubly functions as the hardware for the Devs project, certainly doesn’t remind the viewer of a typical startup environment. There are no ping pong tables in sight. While we should probably assume that today’s tech giants have secret labs somewhere, nobody knows what they look like, so Devs’ creators were able to take some creative liberties, using a fictional style of architecture along the lines of “psychedelic Faraday cage brutalism.”
The Devs project is supposed to convincingly make viewers unsure if free will is able to triumph over determinism, consider whether the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is credible, and ask themselves if they’re living in a simulation. For me, it initially felt like a bit of a letdown that the software designed to prompt such heady questions looks like something that anybody could download on their laptop. Wouldn’t it have been cool if they had enlisted the H.R. Giger of product design to make something more fitting of these heady meditations?
In a way, though, maybe it was the more interesting choice to go with a standard IDE design, prompting the suggestion that the questions of Devs apply directly to the very world we live in, and the software real developers use every day. Another angle is that the use of this CLI-derived design evokes the origins and history of computing at the same time that it embodies the immanent horizon of quantum computing, as well as the general question of “the future of tech.” In this way, the user interface Sergei encounters is a bite like Janus, ominously looking forward and backward at the same time.
Either way, this scene got me thinking, and I had some fun one afternoon trying to mock up something that would be immediately recognizable as fictional software. It was an interesting exercise – how could I make something that invokes the conventions of a computer program, but diverges enough from those conventions that be recognizably fantastical? My process involved some “remixing” of common WIMP conventions.
If you have any thoughts on this piece, or can tell me about the H.R. Giger of product design, I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me an email at alexanderiadarola@gmail.com. I’m also currently looking for new UX design opportunities, so feel free to reach out if there’s a project you’d like to discuss.
