One on One: Justin Ouellette, Designer of Interfaces for 'Robot & Frank' In the future, all devices are voice-activated and have transparent displays. The elderly are assigned robot caretakers to tidy up their apartments, cook their meals and help them plant gardens. It's a possibly idyllic vision, one that involves a pervasive reliance on technology and raises questions about what that dependency might mean for human-android relationships. That's the world imagined in "Robot & Frank," a sweet and funny science-fiction film directed by Jake Schreier and starring Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon and Liv Tyler, about an aging father and the helper bot his son buys to take care of him. Justin Ouellette, a designer living in New York, created the user interface for the computers and touch-screen devices in the movie. Mr. Ouellette has worked on a number of interesting side projects, including Muxtape, a streaming mixtape site, and now works at Tumblr, the microblogging service. Here is an edited transcript of an interview with him. How did you get involved in "Robot & Frank"? I knew the director, who is in a band called Francis and the Lights. He plays keyboard. I originally knew Francis and worked with him for a little bit, shot some photographs for him. I met Jake Schreier [the director] through that and we became friends. In June, Jake told me he was making this movie. He knew I was interested in user interfaces and he asked me to do it. How did you come up with the interfaces and software seen in the movie? Well, the movie is not too far off in the future. Things would look the same but a little different - not so Apple-y. Frank is not a savvy young technology user. His kids bought him the TV that he uses in his house, so I tried to imagine something that someone like that would use. Someone who isn't the most savvy and is a little flummoxed by modern advancements. It treads the line between looking plausibly futuristic and also mass-market, possibly the Android of the market. It wouldn't necessarily be super slick, like "Minority Report." Was that hard, given that you hadn't seen the final movie at that point? I got a set of clips for every shot in the movie that had a screen in it. Frank's got a TV, the characters have cellphones, tablets. The process was to design the product like I would for any other product. Then I imagined code for it, the indicators that the characters would see, weather updates, the time, status messages. How were your prototypes and designs translated into the final version of the film? The final designs were in Photoshop. They composited them onto the screen and animated them. I saw a working cut of the film and it was really fun to see something I'd only ever seen in Photoshop. It's interesting that Frank initially views much of the technology in his life - the videoconferencing, his smartphone, the robot itself - as intrusive and annoying. Was that deliberate, given the overall tone of the movie? Again, I had to think about how Frank would be using it. He never has any messages. The only people that call him are his kids. The way he uses these things is very hands-off and it's all voice-activated. That's a nod to the way things might actually be going. It's surprisingly minimalist, very sleek and simple. The designs in the movie are simple and clean, which is an aesthetic I tend towards. We wanted the people in the story to be the center of attention. The devices are also all slabs of glass, just pure sheets of glass. There are no dial pads, no buttons. When you're looking at Liv Tyler's face, you don't want to see it surrounded by a bunch of buttons. But it had to be plausible. I had to challenge some of the assumptions about how I think about work and what I do day-to-day for the Web and mobile phones. I got rid of all buttons. The TV doesn't have any buttons, he's using Siri on a TV and all his calls are video. It all felt like things we might see incorporated in the future. "Robot & Frank" had its premiere at Sundance earlier this year and is due out in theaters next month.