The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

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mmvdtnz about 5 hours ago 30 commentsRead Article on designyoutrust.com

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stymaar•about 3 hours ago

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:

- 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.

Lio•about 3 hours ago

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.

I see the same thing in mid-century BBC studios.

1. Which I love.

2. https://www.hainbachmusik.com/

Monotoko•about 3 hours ago

> 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!"

stymaar•about 2 hours ago

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”.

Lio•about 2 hours ago

Vintage nuclear plants are also infamously used as the canonical examples of bad UI in teaching.

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...

mysecretaccount•about 3 hours ago

There is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.

mrweasel•about 2 hours ago

Well, how about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant#/med...

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.

varjag•about 1 hour ago

Heat dissipation and gracious distances for installation and servicing.

stymaar•about 3 hours ago

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).

barrkel•about 1 hour ago

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

padolsey•about 3 hours ago

I love these!

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)

beltranaceves•about 3 hours ago

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)

johnny_canuck•19 minutes ago

I use brave on mobile and didn't notice a thing

stymaar•about 3 hours ago

Firefox mobile + ublock origin is the way.

mellosouls•about 3 hours ago

(2018)

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

ademarre•about 3 hours ago

This reminds me of "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green":

[0] https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960

avian•about 3 hours ago

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.

paradoxyl•about 1 hour ago

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.

lll-o-lll•about 3 hours ago

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.

unsnap_biceps•about 2 hours ago

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.

iancmceachern•about 2 hours ago

I used to work for a guy who said at that company we made stuff that "looked like the soviets designed it in the 70s"

galaxyLogic•about 3 hours ago

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?

zyndct•about 3 hours ago

Some of the consoles had neon tubes for number display. They emit warm orange lights when triggered by ~300Vdc.

fuzzfactor•about 1 hour ago

I like the top picture where it looks like the chefs are watching the controls while the engineers are down in the cafeteria enjoying a lunch break :)