Design philosophy for the Engine meters style — the second desktop widget. Where the Bars style is a chart, Engine Room is a working diagram: a glass cutaway of the machine itself, every part doing its actual job.
The job: teach the system's mechanics at a glance. A viewer who watches it for one minute should understand — memory fills, overfill spills to swap, cores pump, the GPU spins, and stress crushes everything.
Engine Room believes the best explanation is a working model. RAM is a glass reservoir: wired memory is bedrock at the bottom, compressed memory sits above it as dense sediment, and app memory is the liquid that visibly rises and falls, its surface alive. Memory pressure tints the liquid and sends bubbles up through it. When the reservoir runs high, the overflow pipe drips into the swap sump below — and the sump's rising red level is the one alarm color in the room.
Work is motion with a mechanical cause. The CPU is a row of pistons, one per core — performance cores and efficiency cores each pumping at their own core's true pace, so a single busy core reads as exactly that. The GPU is a turbine whose spin rate is its utilization; while a model streams tokens, cyan sparks fly off the turbine rim — computation made kinetic. The disk is a small platter spinning faster as throughput climbs.
Stress is gravity: a heavy press spans the ceiling, and as the composite stress score rises it descends, visibly compressing the whole room — every element squeezes into the shrinking space, and near the top of the scale the housing rattles. Calm is tall and quiet; a crushed engine room is unmistakable.
Color is earned by load, exactly as in the scenes: the machinery is ash glass at rest, each part takes the green→amber→red severity ramp only as its own signal climbs, swap alone owns standing red, and token sparks own cyan. No decoration, no texture cosplay — geometry and motion carry it.
Is not: a dashboard, skeuomorphic texture-art, or busy at idle. Kills on sight: numbers, gradients as decoration, motion without a mechanical cause. Signature move: the stress press — the whole room visibly crushed smaller as the machine strains, rattling near the limit.