Tools of Innovation #2: Sci-Fi

This week, Ekso Bionics announced it's abandoning exoskeletons entirely. Revenue down 29% in 2025, an $11.7 million loss, and now a reverse merger into a cloud computing business. One of the companies most associated with turning Ripley's Power Loader from Aliens into a real, sellable product just walked away from the category after decades of trying.

James Cameron put that machine on screen in 1986: a wearable forklift, hydraulic arms, built to let one person move cargo a crane would normally handle. It looked inevitable. Japanese firms spent years chasing it — Panasonic's Activelink built a working Power Loader Light in 2010, Mitsui announced its own version not long after. Manufacturing it at a cost anyone would actually pay, and proving it made economic sense over a forklift or a second labourer, turned out to take three decades and still isn't solved. Ekso's exit this week is the latest evidence.

Why Designers Look to Science Fiction

Designers observe popular culture to birth innovation, and science fiction has long been a place designers look to for ideas. Things conjured up in Hollywood blockbusters have consistently made their way into production, consciously or subconsciously, via the noticing and observation of designers.

This is one of the least understood parts of how physical products actually get invented. Engineers work from data: performance benchmarks, tolerances, cost targets, existing products to improve on. That produces real value, but it's inherently incremental — better versions of things that already exist. Genuine step-changes tend to come from somewhere less structured: observation, empathy, and exposure to ideas that haven't been filtered through what's currently manufacturable. Film and television are one of the richest sources of exactly that, because they run thousands of hours of speculative design with no constraint from cost, material science, or supply chains. As an industrial design consultancy based in Sydney, this is a lens we bring to every product development project — because the best ideas rarely come from just optimising what already exists.

Someone still has to notice it, though, and then do the years of unglamorous engineering to find out whether the idea survives contact with a factory floor and a P&L. Sometimes it does.

The iPad and Kubrick's Newspad

Stanley Kubrick put a flat, rectangular tablet in astronauts' hands in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968 — more than forty years before Apple released the iPad. In the film, the device is called a Newspad: propped on a table, used to read news while eating, screen dominating the form. It's a strikingly close visual match to the tablets that would eventually become one of the best-selling product categories in consumer electronics history.

The connection became more than a design footnote in 2011, when Samsung's lawyers cited that scene from 2001 in Apple's design-patent lawsuit against the Galaxy Tab, arguing that the rectangular slate with a dominant screen had existed in the public imagination decades before any single company could claim to own the form factor. The judge ultimately ruled on other grounds, but the argument made a point worth sitting with: the idea of the tablet was culturally available for over 40 years before anyone had the manufacturing capability, battery technology, and touch interface to build it properly. Apple didn't invent the concept. They observed it, and then did the extraordinarily difficult work of engineering it into something buildable, affordable, and desirable at scale.

The StarTAC and Star Trek's Communicator

Motorola's story is more direct. Engineers on the team that would go on to build the StarTAC had grown up watching Captain Kirk flip open a handheld communicator to call the ship in the original Star Trek series. In 1996, Motorola released the StarTAC — the first true flip phone — and named it, quite openly, after the show that inspired it. This wasn't a legal argument constructed after the fact. It was a conscious, acknowledged translation of a fictional object into a manufacturable one, and it created an entire product category that would dominate mobile phone design for the next decade.

What the Power Loader Tells Us About Innovation

Both the iPad and the StarTAC made it to market and reshaped their categories. The Power Loader, so far, hasn't. In my view, that's not a failure of innovation, and it's not simply a limit of engineering either — it's that the Power Loader still needs more innovation before engineering can make it viable. The idea has been observed, correctly, by multiple serious companies for over a decade. What's missing isn't vision. It's the further leaps in materials, power density, and cost structure needed before the concept can cross from "technically possible" to "commercially sound." That gap is exactly why innovation is unpredictable in a way incremental engineering isn't: you can schedule a performance improvement, but you can't schedule the breakthrough that makes a wearable forklift make commercial sense.

Why This Matters for Product Development

This is the core of what industrial designers bring to product development that's easy to overlook: the ability to notice ideas in unlikely places, before there's any data to justify them, and translate that observation into something that can survive real-world manufacturing and commercial constraints. It's a fundamentally different skill from optimising an existing product's performance, and it's where genuinely new categories tend to come from.

If you're developing a physical product and want that kind of observation-led thinking applied to it from the start, that's exactly the gap an experienced industrial design consultancy in Sydney is built to fill — bringing an outside eye to problems before they've been narrowed down to only what looks feasible on paper.

Get in touch with Paranormal Design to talk through your next product.