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.

Summer (Blog) Fashions

How can you tell when I have a lit­tle more time on my hands? A change to the look and feel of this blog is a sure sign. For those who don’t read it via the feed (which means, fam­ily and a few oth­ers, rather than other blog­gers), I’ve once again fid­dled with the theme or rather the pages of the blog/web site. There are a few minor glitches, but over­all, I’m pleased with this one, and if I don’t screw it up, this design might be in place for a while. The pic­ture of the moun­tains in the header is from a recent pic­nic at Locarno Beach.

(Warn­ing, geek­ery to fol­low : ) I’m still a fan of the Geor­gia font for body text, but now I’m mak­ing the more stan­dard font choice of a sans serif (Hel­vetica or Arial if you don’t have that installed) font for head­ers and nav­i­ga­tion. I’ve decided to take the chance of using the Word­Press ‘wid­get’ tech­nol­ogy for the side­bar, instead of rely­ing on the theme’s own PHP code for gen­er­at­ing the cal­en­dar, search box, blogroll and cat­e­gory list, which may or may not be a good idea. Already I can see some dis­ad­van­tages to this approach, as the sort order of the blogroll is no longer ran­dom­ized and always appears in alpha­bet­i­cal order. I guess the answer is to use a dif­fer­ent wid­get, but I’m new to this approach. I also can’t fig­ure out how I’ll insert Flickr thumb­nails between wid­gets. I’m think­ing that will need a wid­get of its own. Will have to research further.

At any rate, the advan­tage to exper­i­ment­ing is that you learn more, so I’ll surely be play­ing around a bit more. I’m already a bit more sure of myself on the CSS side of things, so hope­fully there will be fewer lay­out glitches.

Now I just have to fig­ure out how to get the home page listed in the page list…

Things to Do When You are Between Jobs

It’s been a lit­tle over a week before my last day at IBM. I was frankly blown away by the good-bye that I got from cowork­ers that Fri­day. We all went out to a Thai feast in Burn­aby (and by Thai feast, I mean it just kept com­ing and com­ing until we started gig­gling as each dish was brought to the table; Pad Thai? Sure, Crispy Fish with sauce? Why not!? More Stir-Fried Veg­eta­bles? Of course!)

I packed up my desk (I had spent over a week mov­ing books and toys from it to home in half a dozen trips). It was a strange time, with my time alloted to the project over, and work still need­ing to be done the project I’ve been work­ing on. I hope that I haven’t left too much hang­ing; Some of it was depen­dent on details of fea­tures that had not been defined yet, but where I had to leave wire­frames (which are essen­tially dia­grams of how screens should look and what should be on them and where) par­tially fin­ished, I tried to make it clear how they could be com­pleted. I said many good-byes to friends and col­leagues, and drove home from Burn­aby, a lit­tle dazed (hey, it was prob­a­bly all that food at lunch).

On Sat­ur­day, we decided to play tourist all over again. We went to the open house of CityTV and took a sta­tion tour, meet­ing most of the crew of Break­fast Tele­vi­sion (which I must con­fess, we’re not reg­u­lar view­ers of, but it was fun, nev­er­the­less). I won a CityTV Umbrella, and we got some Cold Stone Cream­ery Ice Cream at the end of the tour. I like the sta­tion; It’s small and has a lot of per­son­al­ity, and they run Jeop­ardy each evening (and also carry Reaper, which is a lot of fun and another series filmed here).

Sat­ur­day Night, I went to the ticket office at the Orpheum just before the Sym­phony Con­cert, and got a last-minute seat for the con­cert (only $15!). I heard the VSO play one of my favourite pieces, Prokofiev’s Third Sym­phony. I love it because it’s mostly loud and fast, and almost never lets up. In par­tic­u­lar, the third move­ment is some of the wildest and most vivid music that Prokofiev ever wrote, and much of the drama of the piece is due to the fact that it’s taken from his opera ‘The Flam­ing Angel’, which chron­i­cles a young nun’s psy­chotic break­down and pur­suit of a man she believes is an angel, com­plete with an on-stage exor­cism and chase through the streets. Not your usual opera fare, and cer­tainly not your usual Sym­phony. The orches­tra did a fine job, but I sus­pect that it was too racy for the crowd, who didn’t give it as much of a stand­ing ova­tion as they did for the Tchaikovsky Piano Con­certo in the first half. Ah, when will they stop doing this?! Once again, peo­ple, when every per­for­mance gets a stand­ing ova­tion, it ceases to mean anything!

The rest of the week­end was a bit qui­eter, but things picked up again today, with a job inter­view. I’m not going to write more about that until things set­tle down either way. Pam also has a lead on a con­tract, so it’s prob­a­ble that the free time between engage­ments for both of us is prob­a­bly going to come to an end soon.

Tomor­row evening is a spe­cial SIGCHI event: the film designer Syd Mead (who was respon­si­ble for the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sets and scenery of Blade Run­ner) will be in town speak­ing, fol­lowed by a screen­ing of the final cut of the movie.