(As well as engineering the video does touch on medical procedures, psychological experiments performed on animals and themes like kidnapping, murder and execution. Also some Nazi imagery and a very brief appearance of a homophobic slur.)

Round 4 sumitted:

Have you seen this? It’s an interesting lecture by Mike Hill about using functional, industrial principles and meaning in your designs to make a world more rich and believable. In the first part of the lecture, he talks about the difference between deeper satisfaction and pleasure buttons, with “The Last of Us” being an example of deeper layered design and “Candy Crush” being an example of instant pleasure button pushing. It’s funny how he stresses the importance to think about how things work and make them believable, since it also perfectly applies to bikini armor.

Bikini armor designs are nothing more than simple, instant pleasure designs. It’s a very simple, lazy form of gratification.To use his words, it’s short term, forgettable and contextless.

In contrast to that: believable, functional, deeper designs of female characters (and their armor) would bring much more depth to games and film and long term happiness and meaning.

I wonder how many bro-ncept artists are watching this lecture and think “yeah yeah I need to make that robot more believable” and then draw a girl in a bikini next to it though…

The video is quite long  but definitely worth sitting through if you’re aspiring towards doing design of any sort.

A key point covered is that if you want people to get immersed and invested in your work then it needs to be internally consistent. You don’t need to be 100% realistic, but you need to consider the message behind design decisions and their relationship with your overall production.

For those who find the encoding section and talking about the chair, there’s further discussion of the same topic at Every Frame A Painting.  But essentially the core message the same is: Everything that appears in a production can either re-enforce the message or detract from it at conscious and subconscious levels.

So, unless your story is primarily about sexy people doing sexy things, odds are good that design decisions to advertise sexual availability shouldn’t be a standard – particularly only for one gender while others are issued with practical attire.

Whether you consciously remember it or not doesn’t really effect the impact, it’s just really more about whether you were looking for it.  You might not notice it, but your brain will.

– wincenworks