Murderbot | Designing a future world that doesn’t look like Alien

Production designer Sue Chan tells us about creating a truly futuristic-looking world for AppleTV+’s sci-fi series, Murderbot.

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Murderbot, Apple’s new TV series based on Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries books, is set in a future where broad swathes of the galaxy are under the control of a small collection of gigantic and ruthless corporations. It’s an exciting set-up for a science fiction universe, but hardly one unfamiliar to fans. So in deciding what that universe would look like, there was one huge overshadowing presence that Murderbot had to differentiate itself from at the outset.

“We very explicitly decided not to make it look like Alien,” says Sue Chan, Murderbot’s production designer. “This show is almost like a workplace comedy. It’s not about dystopia as much as the evolution of these different tribes of humans. There are the corporate overlords for whom profit is their only goal and there are people who are humanists for whom the goal is a good society.”

It’s a vision of the future that is perhaps a little bit more nuanced than the ultra-capitalist space dystopia audiences are often fed by in science fiction.

“We didn’t want to do a universe devolving into a dog eat dog kind of place. We wanted it to be what would happen if Amazon took over the universe, but also what would happen to the people who just want to live good lives?” Chan says. “It’s not a dystopic vision. It’s asking, ‘If you took today and carried on the narrative through hundreds of generations of what exists now, where do you end up?’”

Designing a future

Creating a sci-fi aesthetic by projecting current trends into the future might seem like Design 101, but in the current TV landscape it is surprisingly rare to see it even attempted. With today’s TV science fiction, from Silo and Fallout to For All Mankind and Severance, the aesthetic leans heavily into recreating a historic vision of the future rather than trying to anticipate what our own future might look like.

“One of the fundamental ideas in the middle of our story that is never explicitly focused on, is the idea that everything is 3D printed,” Chan says. “For instance, if you look at the inhabitants, the colour of the habitats is based foundationally on the colour of the quarries that we were filming in.”

The story that Chan tells us is that the Corporation Rim dropped a 3D printer onto the planet or moon, mined all that material, then used it as a substrate to print each of the habitats. It means the DeltFall habitat looks like the soil around it, while the PresAux habitat, where Murderbot is stationed, is coloured like the soil around that. Even the Corporation Rim space station is a mesh printed from mined asteroid belt material.

“When you go into the conference room you see this piece of asteroid and it’s almost like going into a lumber company. They might have the core of the biggest tree there as the coffee table,” Chan explains. “It’s a really simple idea and based on how you would do it now if you were being efficient.”

As Chan points out, her job isn’t to reinvent the wheel. The way steel is smelted, or fossil fuel is processed has been refined, but is fundamentally the same process now as when it began, so the future may be more recognisable than you might expect.

The same thing is true even in the factory where Murderbot is built, which was designed to evoke images of modern sweat shops.

“The outside of each of those bubble pods is kind of unsanitary and dangerous and warehousy. If you’re doing it on the cheap and really fast, you throw up these clean room bubbles – which exist now! We just made them bigger and lit them more interestingly,” says Chan.

The most surprising element of the factory, particularly for fans of Murderbot’s title sequence, is just how much human handiwork there is in the building of a SecUnit.

“There are some things humans are good at, and some things robots are good at,” Chan says. “We amplify that for humour but there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel and throw out what we do now.”

In the end, the changes that stand out most are the minor details. User interface design hasn’t moved on a long way since Star Trek: The Next Generation’s PADDs (bar a short-lived trend of “what if mobile phones were transparent”), but Murderbot introduces the concept of a cylindrical screen.

As Chan puts it, “The data keeps churning and churning and that forces the information into people faster and maybe people evolved to see more and take more in.”

The culture we take with us

Building the future isn’t just about designing cool tech or guessing what will change. It’s also about asking what will survive: what puts the “preservation” in PresAux?

“I started out by taking the most ancient societies on each continent – Etruscans, Asian, European, and African cultures,” Chan tells us. “I looked at the most fundamental motifs and gathered them into a bible, then asked my team to imagine 100 generations from now, when the diaspora of Earth have chosen to live together in society. How would they evolve a unified set of symbols? A language that really honours where they came from.”

This informed the alphabet that can be seen in the decoration painted across the otherwise grey, corporate habitat the PresAux crew are leasing. At the same time, acknowledging how much of the crew is queer and polyamorous, the colours of the rainbow are also entwined into their decorations.

“All of that is mashed up but it has a fundamental logic to it,” says Chan.

The PresAux habitat also boasts plenty of textiles and pottery, establishing them as a craft culture.

“They want to make things and be connected to everything they do, contrasted with the things they were leasing from the corporation that are sterile and 3D printed,” Chan says.

The cultures of the different factions are also visible in other ways, such as the passive wind and solar power the PresAux habitat uses, compared to the more aggressive and intrusive geothermal and fusion power sources at the DeltFall habitat, which has the “slickest, greyest most colourless version of what the corporation will provide them.”

“We wanted to do that narrative based design in each element. What’s the little story we’re telling about these people?” Chan asks.

Dangerous new worlds

That narrative design approach is also seen in the non-human, or even non-SecUnit inhabitants of Murderbot’s world. Because while large parts of the planet might look like the classic TV sci-fi quarry, it isn’t completely uninhabited.

“The flora and fauna are important, but we have to think about the practical reality of shooting exteriors, and there is only so far you can go with visual effects,” Chan says. “It always goes back to narrative based design. The planet is almost unexplored with no industrialisation or humans, and plants and animals were allowed to flourish.”

Once again, Chan and her team drew on real world inspirations for their designs. There are plants that look like lollipops but are actually based on slime mould. Artist Guy Davis went through numerous designs to perfect the “burrower” monster that terrorises the PresAux crew.

Sometimes there are ideas that prove impractical for actual filming.

“We had an idea of photosynthesis being completely different from Earth, so everything green might have been white, but that was too heavy a lift for the camera department,” Chan recalls. “It comes from knowing that if you could see ultraviolet light everything would be white, but we never went that way in the end. It’s all about the science, and how that informs the creature.”

Designing the Murderbot

One design that absolutely has to tell a story is that of the Murderbot itself. As a character, it provides a real challenge to the show’s designers. On the one hand, it is a product of The Company, literally a corporate tool. On the other hand, it is a design that needs to exude personality.

And Murderbot is a tool of the corporate overlords but becoming culturally part of the PresAux Team. 

“There was a lot of discussion about the costume because there are three different types of SecUnit, Murderbot, GrayCris, and DeltFall and each one is a step up in technology but a step down in terms of personality,” Chan says. 

Chan is quick to point out that the bulk of Murderbot’s appearance is the work of the show’s excellent costume team, but Chan is equally proud of the work her team did to create the logo that adorns its face.

She tells us, “We liked the idea that the corporation just put their logo on its [Murderbot’s] face. So its mask is the logo, and we like that the little dot might be like an eye or the dog in Our Gang with a little spot over its eye. We wanted to create a character that was many things at once. Weirdly loveable but also clearly a tool of the Corporation Rim.”

Murderbot is streaming now on Apple TV+.