Future’s designs
Artist, illustrator, futurist and conceptual designer for films including Blade Runner and Alien, Syd Mead was in Dubai recently. He shares his views on modern Arab architecture and the future of films with Rajeev Nair
The difficult part of being a futurist, Syd Mead says, “is to stay ahead of what the public thinks is beyond.” Mead does not need an introduction for Blade Runner fans. The sci-fi classic set in a decaying Los Angeles of 2019, and starring Harrison Ford, is arguably the most influential in its genre. Mead was its visual futurist, meaning, he designed the film’s props – streetscapes and vehicles.
Visual consultant with Star Trek and conceptual artist for Aliens and Mission to Mars, Mead’s flirtations with Hollywood are but one facet of the man, who creates a slice of what the future could hold. His design challenges have spanned private 747 interiors, super yachts, and high visibility commercial design.
He was in the UAE, flying in from Amsterdam, landing in Abu Dhabi, and while the futurist was ready to meet and greet Dubai, he wasn’t prepared for the long string of lights from the capital city to the ‘futuristic city in the Middle East.’ He was impressed.
As far as Dubai’s architectural designs go in a futurist context, it could start with an existing culture. Designers could then stick to it or create a new version, observes Mead. Pertinently, he is seated at Al Qasr, Madinat Jumeirah, and finds it an “architectural theme park.” The challenge before designers, he says, would be to facilitate the transfer of a familiar architecture and culture into a new version – something that isn’t simply improved or stylistic but high contrast, totally new.
Mead was in Dubai partnering with Bahrain-based Vaheed Associates, to explore the design challenges the region could offer. He has worked on projects in Arabia. In Houston, Mead had worked with architects creating a new capital city for Saudi Arabia in Riyadh. The familiarity he earned from the culture, geometry, graphics and architectural rules later came handy when he designed the interiors of a private jet for the royalty. “I call it a supersonic culture,” explains Mead. “I take the pattern, the colour preference and move that on its own evolutionary future.”Sydney Mead drew actual scenes – “complete with background, objects, people, buildings and vehicles”- when he was only four years old. At 19, he bagged his first professional job doing animation cell inking, character origination and background illustration with Alexander Film Company. Volunteering for military service and rising to the rank of sergeant, he joined art school upon discharge three years later. Following three months at Ford Motor Company’s Advanced Styling Studio, he created concept designs for Hansen Company in Chicago for clients including US Steel. Hollywood assignments followed as did his brush with commercial design.
His bio is marked by what others might regard as “materialistic” accomplishments. A landmark year in Mead’s life means a new car, a new house. “They are important for the kind of futurist that I am,” says Mead. “I am associated with the technological world; how things are made and the techniques that make things a certain way. My futurist tendencies are to design the technologically-oriented. Architecture is part of that scenario too but I come up with architecture elements as the background, not my primary object.”
To be a futurist, it is important to respect the past, says Mead. “The past is what you depend upon. You rest one hand on the familiar so that you can reach out to something that is entirely new. If you lose sight of the familiar, you wouldn’t know where you are headed because the future is a kind of speeded up version of the past.”
Mead says it is possible to be realistic while being futuristic. Futuristic design, concept design need not necessarily be intimidating. “In Japan, you have 60-storey, 70-storey skyscrapers right next to little neighbourhood houses. That is intimidating. Architects like to pretend that their new building has nothing around it, as if it stands on its own. That is never the way it is. Architects make the rendering as if it is all a countryside; that is the architectural ego.”
Mead had modeled his futuristic projections for Los Angeles 2019 in Blade Runner with elements from the World Trade Centre building. The film, he says, was “wonderfully dismal. Philip K. Dick’s (the film was based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) stories had the message that humanity had its flaws.”
He has worked most recently for A Sound of Thunder, directed by Peter Hyams, who conceived 2010. The film stars Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley and is about a game hunter who goes on a time-travelling Safari to hunt dinosaurs in the prehistoric era. After glimpsing into the future, Mead treads back in time – but for the conceptual designer, the unknown past and the future lent, essentially, the same raw material.
The difficult part about designing films is make things attractive and at the same time recognizable, says Mead. This is all the more challenging in today’s “shrinking” world, where everything gets progressively smaller. “In Star Trek, you have this instant analysis of blood, which was science fantasy at the time of its making. But it is happening now, science fiction is coming true…” observes Mead. Also happening are huge memory storage systems and efficient means of retrieval.
Mead, born 1933, likes his eclectic job profile. “I like working with different people. I get to meet people smarter than I am in all these different fields. It is fascinating because no job is same as the last one and that makes me feel young.”
As a futurist, Mead says his primary task is to “visualize for clients what their object or industry would look like in the alternate future.” And going by the response to his conceptual designs, he says, “there is a common interest all over the world in where we are all going, and that is to help make things better. Every time you change the paradigm or you change the mentality on a worldwide scale, you face resistance because there are people out there who think their way of thinking is being threatened and they don’t know what to do. It is like trapping an animal in a dead end.”
For the forms in motion he captures in his conceptual designs, for all his projections of the future – not necessarily simple – Mead is an optimist. “Eventually, things will get better. Today, we have more people who have enough to eat. There are pockets of extreme poverty but that is usually the result of political or governmental influences. It has nothing to do with the supply; there is enough food in the world for all of us to eat.”
As a futurist, Mead sees the importance of information technology growing in coming years – it could even out all differences. And in films, the classic studios will give way to independent filmmakers and digital film techniques. Complete stories will be executed in five minutes, and creative visualization and story-telling techniques will be employed by amateurs with high degree of professionalism.
Meanwhile, he warns you to not be fatalistic. “The future starts one second from now; you must prepare for the future and believe that it will happen in a nice way.”
