Syd Mead and Third Tuesday

A Bet­ter Blade Run­ner and the Designer Behind its World

Before I got started on redesign­ing this blog, I did get to spend an evening hear­ing sto­ries from a real designer. Last Wednes­day evening’s talk by Syd Mead was a mind-blower.

Before his talk, how­ever, the SIG-CHI Chap­ter of Van­cou­ver, who were host­ing the evening’s event, made some announce­ments, and then… well, the best descrip­tion of it might be a ‘happening’.

Here’s a video that some­one took of it:

(For those who can’t see the video, essen­tially, the lights went off and 2 light­weight balls of stretched fab­ric enclos­ing multi-coloured lights were tossed over the audi­ence. They were about 7 or 8 feet in diam­e­ter, and changed hue every few sec­onds or so. The crowd hap­pily bounced the balls around the hall, remind­ing me of those beach balls that get bounced around over the crowds at polit­i­cal con­ven­tions. Accom­pa­ny­ing the bounc­ing balls, which were called ‘Zygotes’, cour­tesy of Tan­gi­ble Inter­ac­tion Design was a sort of processed audio, from sen­sors respond­ing to impacts as the balls bounced off the crowd or the walls and ceiling.

The main event fol­lowed: Syd Mead. Mead is the designer of a half a dozen films, includ­ing the sci­ence fic­tion clas­sics Tron and Blade Run­ner. He spoke about his work, using a Quick­time movie to show sev­eral decades of illus­tra­tions of futur­is­tic cars, build­ings, cities and other arti­facts of the future that were inside his head and now, per­haps, inside our own as well. There is a DVD of his work as a ‘Visual Futur­ist’, con­tain­ing much of the mate­r­ial from his lec­ture, as well as inter­views with oth­ers about him and his work. Here’s the trailer, from his web site (check out the high def­i­n­i­tion ver­sion there, it’s well worth see­ing at a larger size):

He’s not only a bril­liant designer, but he was a good speaker as well, com­ment­ing on his work and influ­ences. He showed prob­a­bly 50–75 exam­ples of his work over the past 50 years or so in var­i­ous games, car­toons, movies, cars, and indus­trial design projects. I was sur­prised to hear that the two artists who influ­enced him the most were the Baroque painter Car­avag­gio and 19^th/early 20^th cen­tury illus­tra­tor, Max­field Par­rish. As one per­son inter­viewed in the trailer put it, Syd Mead is essen­tially an ‘18^th Cen­tury Man moved to the 20^th and 21^st Cen­tury’. Many oth­ers spoke of the ‘real­ity’ of his vision, that it had gone through much of the evo­lu­tion and test­ing related to a prod­uct, build­ing, or tech­nol­ogy, but entirely in his own mind.

After the talk we saw a screen­ing of the Final Cut (or so it’s now known) of ‘Blade Run­ner’, a film that . That screen­ing, in and of itself was fas­ci­nat­ing as well. The ver­sion has none of the film noir, Ray­mond Chandler-style voice over by Har­ri­son Ford, and there are quite a few scenes either length­ened, added or in one par­tic­u­larly crit­i­cal case, omit­ted (I won’t spoil it if you don’t already know). As I was watch­ing it, I kept mar­veling at the con­sis­tency and rich­ness of the visual envi­ron­ment. The only give­aways that Mead’s vision (like Kubrick’s) of the future wasn’t 100% cor­rect was the appear­ance of the Pan Am logo on a few elec­tronic bill­boards. Boy, nobody saw that air­line as going away, and its logo still looks fine in all of the visu­al­iza­tions of our future.

Third Tues­day

Last night was the monthly meet­ing of Third Tues­day, a com­bi­na­tion pre­sen­ta­tion and mixer, focus­ing on (but not entirely lim­ited to) mar­ket­ing, web 2.0 and the new ‘social media’ that takes place, when­ever pos­si­ble, on the third Tues­day of the month. Last month, Writer and Social Media Evangelist/Consultant, Mon­ica Ham­burg intro­duced many who attended (myself included) to the con­cept of crowd­sourc­ing. This month, Local Van­cou­ver Tech­nol­o­gist, Writer, Racon­teur and Mis­cel­lanist (that’s how his web site puts it) Dar­ren Bare­foot gave an excel­lent ‘case study’ that explained how his mar­ket­ing com­pany, Capulet Com­mu­ni­ca­tions got the atten­tion of the web’s movers and shak­ers through an online demo of his client’s prod­uct. Most sur­pris­ing detail of the cam­paign? To invite key peo­ple to the online demo (actu­ally, a faux company’s Intranet Wiki), they sent invi­ta­tions to about 35 of them via snail mail. That’s right, email has pro­duced so much noise and clut­ter (read: SPAM) that the best way to get to some peo­ple is the old fash­ioned way. It reminded me of an Isaac Asi­mov short story where a bunch of mil­i­tary sci­en­tists real­ize that the best way to com­pute some mis­sile tra­jec­to­ries is through some lost ancient tech­niques, known as ‘mul­ti­pli­ca­tion’ and ‘long divi­sion’ per­formed by a sol­dier with (*gasp!*) a pen­cil and paper… There was no men­tion of telegrams or sig­nal­ing fires, so I’m going to assume that those ‘Employee kits’ sent via Courier were as far back in tech­nol­ogy as he was will­ing to go.

I met up many friends and acquain­tances, and am glad to see that the sum­mer sea­son (and mostly sunny skies) has not meant that every­one is head­ing for the beach, only to recon­nect up in the fall. At least, not yet.