Here, I am going to address one of the most essential aspects that can make or break all else: a sense of proportion.
Fundamentally speaking, our sense of proportion ultimately begins with ourselves, our perceptions of the world measured against the familiar scale of our own bodies and activities. Buildings, vehicles, the world around us: we often only appreciate scale when we can draw a direct comparison, or see a representation of human scale in contrast.
Consider how the world used to seem bigger when we were small children. Relatively speaking, it was bigger: for an average adult, it has been reduced to a quarter or even a fifth of its perceived scale in relation to our original infantile proportions.
It is logical that the real world and what mankind designs for use in it fit the sense of proportions: form follows function, and function dictated by the user.
It would be difficult to interact with technology and structures that fail to follow the rules of human proportions. As anyone who is especially small or large can attest, a mismatch in this regard can be a frustrating or painful experience. Aesthetically speaking, comprehending the relationships to human scale is the key to keeping small spaces from being claustrophobic or large ones alienatingly vast, regardless of size — or inducing the contrary impressions, as the designer may desire.
In fictional design, this fundamental relationship is often overlooked or forgotten, leading to confused perceptions of scale.
How many would contest that common claim that the TOS Enterprise is a "small ship"? How many realize that it is 1000 feet long, nigh the length of the US Navy supercarrier? Few would accept a claim that a supercarrier is small, being as they rank among the largest vehicles built by mankind to date. The fictional starship is 24 decks tall — standing in the shadow of a 24 story building impresses one with the fact of how big that is. And yet, it is the common perception that this iconic starship is small — because its scale is only ranked against its larger successors, no thought given to real size.
Forgetting human scale leads to an inability to properly relate to size.
The GALAXY Class Enterprise was nearly double the size of its predecessor, and this fact is one of the reasons for the dismissal of the TOS classic as diminutive — which the latter certainly is, in comparison. Make no mistake: Enterprise-D is huge. When I was in college, I once overlaid a scale silhouette of ENT-D over the sprawling campus, and was startled by how much ground was overshadowed. Even with the rows of windows on the ship, one does not quite grasp the sheer size of it until one sees such a stark comparison.
Here is a view of it overlaid on the Pentagon in Washington DC:
But even grasping the size of that familiar government building is a bit of a trick until one recognizes the cars parked around it. If there are people in that photo, they are too small to be seen. And ENT-D's enormity is even more stunning in profile against a skyline:
This is a damn big ship — yet the current trend in Star Trek (and so many other sci-fi settings) is to go bigger, just to be larger — and thus be "cooler", perceived as greater, more powerful, or some other juvenile or aesthetic oversimplification — than this grand vessel. In effect, the fundamental point of comparison, the human proportion, has been completely abandoned in design, and rampant size inflation ensues with no clear perspective on real proportionate scale.
There are logical arguments for mammoth ships, and these conform to the same "form follows function follows user" chain.
This tact steers the process — and the results — back into the realm of solid, credible design. In this regard, one can look at the design work in the Star Wars saga, from the gargantuan Star Destroyers to the far smaller ships — the freighters, fighters, and so forth — that lie within the scale of human comprehension. The moviemakers' used this to shape the audience impressions of the Rebels versus the Empire: the good guys humanly relatable; the bad, oppressive and dehumanizing. There was also a clear functional logic at work, following closely upon the navel model for the superships, and of aircraft and automobiles for the small, which guided the design process and provided visual cues which would suggest credible functionality.
Ironically, the juxtaposition of these differing sizes on the backdrop of vast space creates its own perceptual problems with what constitutes "big" in that setting As this scale chart of mine illustrates, even some of the "small" ships are quite big in human terms — check out the speck that is C-3PO!.
Space is big and makes everything look small.
Even the biggest sea-going ship looks minute in comparison to the open ocean, and the perspectiveless depths of space are even more vast, dwarfing everything in it, be it ship, planets, stars and all else. Within the context of that stage, it is the people that matter most: as the characters, as the audience, as the point of reference that connects the two via meaningful narrative. Building from the foundation of the human element is what makes the fiction work, makes its design elements credible.
We perceive the universe from the perspective of ourselves — design accordingly, and the universe becomes relatable.
Bringing a sense of human proportion to the process can make even the smallest detail more meaningful, allowing one to imagine personal interaction, even as one sees the characters do so. This is the foundation of good design in fiction, whether the goal is to be friendly or hostile, familiar or alien, following the same basic rules of real world design as it relates to the people who make and use it.
Then there are the issues of engineering credibility and structural proportion in fictional design...
But that, however, is a topic for another time.
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