It's not specific to the Soviet world, any control room built before computers looks like that. The examples I'm the familiar with is nuclear power plants from the 70s:
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).
That's not true. If you look at Chernobyl Family[1]'s videos, modern Russian war equipment internals and their color choices, there's a longstanding research and deliberate choice behind them.
Soviets/Russians seems to select the seafoam or tealish green colors as backgrounds since these colors create a calmer environment which helps when everything else is pressuring you.
The most interesting thing is public ISS telemetry page at [2]. Go to Russian version and the color scheme changes to a bluish one which they also use with some of the interiors/control panels Russians use in similar equipment.
Is there some sort of cultural revisionism where we are expected to deny the existence of e.g. the Soviet design sensibility because of contemporary politics? What a bizarre response.
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.
Good point - all those incandescent lamps must have put out huge amounts of heat.
Similarly, the stereotypical giant plasma displays in old-school telco/ISP NOCs made for a properly toasty environment. I know one ISP in the early 2000s who had to bring in a spare datacentre aircon unit to reinforce the puny office system which was completely unable to cope by itself.
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.
control rooms are central to controlling expensive systems serving important purposes and whose failure might be highly dangerous. that's why function is the essential and indisputable primary goal. accordingly their design is all about "form follows function". why form that follows function is so distinctively appealing and aesthetic is up to debate ... but empirically it is.
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)
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.
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?
Navigation equipment, radios, autopilot, auto-throttle, multiple engines with multiple parameters to be controlled, multiple hydraulic systems, pressurization and environmental controls.
Consider that for each jet engine you have different displays for RPMs, temperatures, oil pressure. Things add up fast.
Modern airliners do away with most dedicated instrumentation (a few critical ones such as airspeed, compass heading, and altitude might still have analog backups) and use a few screens to display all of this. Computers monitor most of the parameters and issue alerts when anything is out of normal.
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.
AI designs will start to look more (biologicaly) evolved, less intentionally designed. Museums, especially older ones are full of jars with pickled specimens, bags of bones and tubes and strings which somehow seemed to fulfil their purpose. Humans will study the objects to find out what makes them work.
You can imagine a scenario where the pervasive use of AI has dumbed down humanity so much that they can only stare at the intricate designs while marveling at the omniscient creator which must have been behind it all.
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.
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
These older systems design principles have really scratched a part of my brain and I'm keen to keep pulling that thread. Do you have any recommended readings on the topic?
SCADA. Mechanism Design. ANSI/ISA-18.2-2016. NASA "Power of Ten" Safe Coding. "The Pit of Success". Poka Yoke. Kaizen/Seiton. "The Five S's". Fuben-eki ("The Benefits of Inconvenience").
20+ years ago, I worked in several reactor control rooms. The light quality astonished me the first time I entered: it was bright, shadowless, and flicker-free. The entire ceiling acted as a light source; the whole area was covered in fluorescent tubes, positioned beneath a grid similar to those photographers use to control light spill from softboxes. The only way to see a direct light source was to look straight up. To prevent flickering, they used three-phase mains power, connecting one-third of the lamps to each phase.
Modern office lighting is far inferior. Almost every time I look up in the office, I am met with a harsh glare piercing my eyes.
Battersea power station in London has preserved chunks of the old control room. Sprawling mechanical complexity certainly has appeal, but we all know frutiger aero is the ultimate aesthetic.
To me they look oppressive and bleak. They are interesting, to be sure. But I don’t find them beautiful. And aesthetics are subjective, of course. I can well believe others find them beautiful.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 28.5 ms ] thread- 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...
Soviets/Russians seems to select the seafoam or tealish green colors as backgrounds since these colors create a calmer environment which helps when everything else is pressuring you.
The most interesting thing is public ISS telemetry page at [2]. Go to Russian version and the color scheme changes to a bluish one which they also use with some of the interiors/control panels Russians use in similar equipment.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@ChernobylFamily
[2]: https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/
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.
Similarly, the stereotypical giant plasma displays in old-school telco/ISP NOCs made for a properly toasty environment. I know one ISP in the early 2000s who had to bring in a spare datacentre aircon unit to reinforce the puny office system which was completely unable to cope by itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playtime
It required a lot of wires back in the day. A lot.
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/
Not to be confused with German musician Haindling's studio, which is a beer hall.
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.
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
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)
You can imagine a scenario where the pervasive use of AI has dumbed down humanity so much that they can only stare at the intricate designs while marveling at the omniscient creator which must have been behind it all.
- 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
"Fortran was invented by IBM. That is why you get a compiler error when you write Fortran without wearing a blue necktie".