Syd Mead wasn’t planning on becoming a visual futurist. The job description didn’t even exist until he invented it.

“They were doing the credits for Blade Runner and they rang and asked what I’d like to call myself,” Mead says. “I’d been doing visual stuff for 20 years and it was mostly future, so I came up with Visual Futurist.”

From organic starships and glistening space colonies, to dystopian cities and grimy spacecraft, if you want to know what any possible future looks like, Syd Mead is the man to call. As well as Blade Runner, his designs have enabled directors to realise future worlds for movies including Star Trek, Aliens, Tron and Elysium.

We meet at Mead’s home and studio in Pasadena – itself a futuristic open-plan house, with verandas and an indoor fountain – set into a wooded hillside. As well as artwork, the walls are covered in shelves of model cars. Mead is also an automobile enthusiast, starting his career at Ford before founding his own corporation in 1970.

His company’s first commission was to design cassette recorders for electronics multinational Phillips in Holland. “When I started, the attitude was to let the engineers make it work and we’ll make it look as good as possible,” he says. “And I arrive as this brash American and I’m doing these renderings for things that didn’t exist – I was hired to work five years ahead of the actual design process.”

Then, shortly after he moved to southern California in 1975, Paramount Pictures called to ask if he’d like to work on a science fiction film. “I thought, why not?” says Mead. “It wasn’t like Saul on the road to Damascus – a flash of light – it was just another job for my corporation.”