Syd Mead has been inventing our future for over sixty years. Originator of the title Visual Futurist, he has designed everything from yachts to watches to film sets. He is well known for his work on Star Trek, Bladerunner, Aliens and Tron as well as his famous US Steel catalogs from the early 1960s. Since he’s been interviewed several times about his work (links in the footer), we focused this interview on his design process and his work beyond film. Special thanks to Roger Servick, Syd’s partner and business manager, for making this interview possible.

Alexa: I’d like to do the interview through the lens of design. You’re a designer. I’m an interaction designer. I want to start with your style and approach. You mentioned when you went to Art Center you already knew how to draw and it was more about the methodology that you were learning.

Syd: Yes, because I’d been drawing since I was 3. I knew how to draw people, animals. I had a very accurate sense of perspective and coloration. Yes, I didn’t go to Art Center to learn how to draw. Now, I did learn the gouache technique which is very fragile because it has to do with texture and the tactile brush on board.

I could concentrate on the gouache technique and the methodology of being a professional to make money. We learned how to pace ourselves with work and that’s very valuable. If you’re working on an active account and you have you hand over something on Wednesday, you really should have it all ready by Monday so if there’s any glitches you can correct them. We were taught what it meant to be a professional, creating images and design and the combination of the two.

A: Which sounds like it really shaped your career?

S: Oh, I knew when I was in the 5th, 6th grade that I was going to make my living drawing pictures already. Because I could draw them so much better than anybody in my age group.

A: I heard you were drawing people’s dogs.

S: Yes, I was charging a quarter in 1941. A quarter equals almost $4 now. These little buddies were buying my artwork for a quarter each. I was already in business.

“I was probably the only one that was drawing vehicles buried into elaborate scenarios with people and things.”

On His Visual Style

A: I’m curious though. How did you come up with your visual style because it’s very unique?

S: It’s a combination of being able to construct accurate perspective and combine that [with composition]. At Art Center, we were exposed to classic composition theory from the masters. We had Fidelson and Carmine, his protégé and so, I became very aware of the geometry inside a picture frame. I’ve put renderings I’ve done side by side, years and years apart, and I favor some kind of an angle through the composition that’s about 42 degrees, or whatever it is. It’s maintained pretty stable over the years. [laughs]

My technique of burying design into scenarios is very [consistent in my work] and not that many people do that. In fact, when I was coming out of Art Center to Ford and then doing the US Steel books for the company in Chicago, I was probably the only one that was drawing vehicles buried into elaborate scenarios with people and things. I could draw figures very well and [those elements] created the recognizability, I think.

Syd’s Future Bugatti for US Steel [Source: SydMead.com]

A: Also, I think your coloration technique is unique.

S: Yes, I like a certain palette. I only use twelve colors. There’s simply no reason in the entire world to buy Cadmium Orange.

Now, Peacock Blue. They don’t make it anymore. It’s a high saturation turquoise. You add a little bit of white to it and the intensity of this turquoise — you simply can’t believe it’s a pigment. It’s very magical. The other odd color is a yellow. It might be Spectrum.

Anyway, a lot of these pigments, if they go through a chemical process to create the pigment and that somehow drifts into an area of ecology, then they’re eventually going to stop making it. I haven’t gone to digital because for me, the learning curve is not worth the actual use of it in real life day by day.

“If you start out too rational at the front end of the idea process, you’re robbing the chance of a coincidence.”

On Tools and Process

A: Your work is probably more precise than digital anyway. Is there any advantage to doing it digitally?

S: Not really. I just went through this for a demo I made for Gnomon’s School here in Los Angeles. Creating a picture in gouache on cardboard. My joke is that “I put pen on board with animal hairs on the end of a stick” — which is what it is. [laughs]

My point was that I don’t care what the tool is. The tool has been changing ever since early man scratched pictures of animals on cave walls. And the tools will continue to change so the key is — do you know how to make a picture? That’s the key. I admire a lot of guys that do beautiful digital work, you know with a Wacom Cintiq. I know how it’s done. It’s just that for me to learn that technique as well as I know gouache, which I’m very familiar with, it just doesn’t strike me as worthwhile.

A: Do you think that we’re losing something overall, with the craftsmen that are taking that forward?

S: It depends on how they’re taught to do it. As I said, if you know how to make a picture, the tool is less important than the idea. It always has been and always will be. If you have a million dollar computer and a bad idea, you end up with a million dollar bad idea…as demonstrated by countless movies.

A: That’s true. Do you have any principles that you rely on to create your work?

S: Well, at Art Center, I learned how to manage my time and to create an idea from zero. To start with a concept — why are you doing this in the first place? If you don’t have a concept, everything beyond that is almost a waste of time. If you’re doing commercial work, that concept has to be in agreement with the client and what they’re after. Is it mood? Or a merchandisable picture of what they make?

Syd’s design for FOODPARC restaurant complex [Source: Sentury II]

Once you have the concept, you sit down and start to sketch. You’re not paying particular attention to details. You’re illustrating in your mind what that concept could look like so you end up with a portfolio of maybe crazy ideas. If you start out too rational at the front end of the idea process, you’re robbing the chance of a coincidence. Then, you have to review those ideas and gradually coax the fluidity and spontaneity of the first pass down into the final product. That’s a trick and some people do it well and some people don’t. You can’t start out solving the problem in one pass. It’s not gonna work. I don’t care how brilliant you are.

A: So then, how do you figure out how to narrow it down?

S: Just by, being more increasingly rational. [laughs] Because all the time, you know what the problem is — if it’s been explained to you. We insist, by contract, that we have one person at the client to contact so we’re not dealing with a committee. I’m not doing wallpaper for a committee to look at and pick the best one out of ten. We insist on having accurate information. So that is our bail out if it’s not going well and then we find out that we were misled. Even very subtly, it changes the whole relationship of why you’re coming up with the idea and what the idea is supposed to be. It’s very critical.

A: What happens in those scenarios?

S: I’ve bailed on an account. I’ve just said this is not working, love you dearly and we’re moving on. We worked on a recent account, won’t mention the client, but I don’t think they had their own discussions and a firm idea of what they were after. I think they thought maybe I would pick something out and run with it. And that’s an awful, wasteful way to work. [laughs] Even if I get paid…

A: Although, you are known as a kind of inventor. Where’s that line to you between invention and design?

S: It depends. I’ve done conceptual design — a lot of it. I’ve also done actual design, some years ago. Nevertheless, the technique was to get accurate information.

I worked as a kind of advisor with Philips Electronics of Eindhoven for twelve years. I designed some real products that were made in the factory and shipped and people bought them. One time, I was designing a TV set. I had zinc cast mechanical drawings from the factory that was making the molds for the whole case. I went at it as I would design a prop. A very fascinating, wonderful prop for a Sci-Fi movie. [laughs] Here’s the hole there for this knob. Let’s think of it, not as a hole for a knob to go in, but some kind of plug-in receptacle for magic. I did these little gouache sketches, about 8x10, for six designs.

The marketing managers of Spain, Italy, England, Germany, France, Canada and the United States liked my designs better than [those of] any of the staff at Philips who had been doing TV sets for half their professional lives. They were so constrained by what they knew they could or couldn’t do. I didn’t care. Those guys didn’t like me anymore.

Syd’s design for wall-size TV for Philips [Source: Philips Design]

A: The other designers, you mean?

S: Yeah, they didn’t like that I bested them. They watched me painting in gouache and said, well, we don’t do that here. We do Dri Mark on paper. They didn’t like me competing with them. They thought it was unfair.

“That’s what they did every day but I thought it was fascinating. It gave me a whole insight into their business that they really had lost, I think.”

On Design Collaborations

A: What do you think makes a great design team? How can great design happen?

S: Everybody has to respect the other person’s capacity for invention. I’m not even going to say you’re working together towards a common goal; I’m going to say you’re looking to put together a possibility portfolio. Within the confines of a parameter, whatever that happens to be. To me, the magic of being a designer is that you are subconsciously aware, in a very detailed format, of what the problem is and then you temporarily and consciously sort of ignore that. And that’s a trick.

You have to have a team that can come up with ideas that would not normally be rational but maybe are, in combination with what somebody else comes up with. Treat each other as individuals not as a conglomerate that has a unified goals. They’re working together, but each of them is supplying a completely individualistic idea to the mix.

A: What’s the true north than for everybody to follow, if not the problem or a shared vision?

S: The True North. Well, the True North is able to do that — to be at once separated from the design problem, being aware of what the overall problem is and then, gradually coaxing the solution to look like one of the wild ideas you came up with for the freshness of it. That’s called originality or uniqueness and that’s what you’re after.

A: What are your collaborations usually like with other designers? Whether it’s at Philips or even in film when you’re working with the Art Department?

S: All the films I’ve worked on, I’ve gotten along very well with the Production Designer of record. Because I let them know right away that I respect what they’re doing. That’s their career, it’s not my career. Production Designers now are different than they were thirty, forty, fifty years ago. They have to scout locations, they have to coordinate with the Director of Photography, the Art Director and the Director. So they’ve got more to do than just doing drawings. They have storyboard artists. They have people like me that are hired to help pull the visual idea out of the director’s head — help him make a successful film and contribute my take on what the story is talking about. So, I’ve had very good relations [with production designers].

In terms of commercial accounts — like Philips or even with Textron which is a big firm in New Orleans — what I’ve found out, over and over again, is that the people in that industry are too close to what they do. They can’t walk away and come back as a demented idea person and approach the problem from a completely new angle. Something inside them doesn’t let them do that or they may not be able to do it because they’ll endanger their careers.

Syd’s design for a personal transponder wand ‘Jivot’ [Source: Sentury II]

I can come in from the outside and if it doesn’t match, they can say, “Oh, we hired this guy and he doesn’t have a clue as to what we’re doing.” I’ve been used by internal people who have a vision but that can’t let that vision flow because of their career endangerment. They can sponsor me to come in and I’ll take the fall if it doesn’t fit. But I still get paid. Always get paid. Roger runs our company and we always get paid.

A: That’s the key. Always getting paid. I think your perspective as an outside consultant is interesting. Do you think that your work would not be the same if you were on the inside?

S: In most cases, with a big corporation, yes. I worked with Celanese. Again, this was way back in the ‘70s. I redesigned their logo for one of their new products. I talked to the chemical engineer who redesigned the product — I mean on a molecular scale — and I came up with a logo was a reflection of why that plastic was different than any other plastic on the market. They thought it was amazing.

When I talked with steel people (US Steel), they weren’t nearly as fascinated with what they were doing as I was. They were adding titanium, a little nickel and a little copper to make their alloy. That’s what they did every day but I thought it was fascinating. It gave me a whole insight into their business that they really had lost, I think.

One of Syd’s designs for US Steel [Source: Gavin Rothery]

Airplane industry, the same thing. Doing interiors of 747s, 757s and 727s, I could come in and think of it in a whole different visual pattern than they would come up with.

“Being able to unravel the reality from the fantasy and then put them back together, that’s why I came up with different ideas than the people who had done this before.”

On Airplane Design

A: When you’re doing a project in a new industry, how much research to you do into the field?

S: Well, there isn’t any. I’m being hired to think up something that may fit their technique level, what they’re capable of doing, but I’m temporarily ignoring that. Then, I’m matching it up as time goes on. In the case of the aircraft industry, the thing has to fly. Everything has to come through the existing door. It’s all modular.

The fire hazards, the chemical [concerns], the vendors take care of that. You get to know the vendors very well and they’ll tell you, “We can vacumold this but the minimum radius is a 1/2 an inch.” That gives your mind a detail level for proposing what it’s going to look like.

A: How far do you go into that implementation when you’re drawing? Do you just think about that or do you articulate that in a rendering?

S: Both. I’ll start in sketch form, real quick sketches, which I don’t show to the client, those are my visual shorthand. That gives me a feeling for what I’m doing. Then, I can make that into more formal presentation drawings and, eventually, renderings. I had never done a 747 interior before — who would? — so I came up with this format of making it an architectural implant into an airplane. The size of the interior of a 747 is impressive. It’s architectural. It’s huge. I was treating it as [architecture]. Let’s make this less round, make it faceted. You do work with mirrors, you expand the view through a slot and you gradually formulate a look. Windows you can’t change but you can put a cover over them. You end up with an implant that is very different from what a person who has done 747s interiors their whole life would come up with. Totally different.

A: That was the King of Saudi Arabia’s plane.

S: Yes. (King Fahd)

A: What were the inputs like on that project? What conversations did you have? Or how did you get to that visual style for him?

S: Actually, very little. I’d worked with architects on Islamic palaces and [structures] for quite a long while so I knew all the prohibitions on ornamentation and geometry. You don’t do hexagons in Islamic architecture because that’s the Jewish star. You would use ten, eight and they also do seven [sided polygons] but that’s very uncommon. I knew all that and I went at it as if we’re going to fit this space with a fantastic interior. Being able to unravel the reality from the fantasy and then put them back together, that’s why I came up with different ideas than the people who had done this [before].

On Nautical Design

A: You have crossed a lot of disciplines, not only in airplane design but yacht design.

S: Cruise ship design is a whole another deal — because that industry is so fossilized. I designed a cruise ship for Norwegian’s Caribbean lines back in ‘73. I got cross-sections of all the liners that were in production at the time. The old Queens and so forth — so I knew what I was going after in terms of volume and size. I had to do a quick education of being a naval designer, which I’m wasn’t then and am not now, but I got a composite idea of why ships are made that way. At that time, the engine funnel stacks came up through the middle of the ship and later, they made them wrap around the passenger compartments. Anyway, I came up with a ship that had a five deck atrium down the middle of the cabin block. The engineers in Copenhagen said that it was asinine because you’re losing all those cabins. I said “Well, we’re going to have a double roll-out on the outside of the atrium. We’ll charge more for the inboard cabins than for the outboard cabins.” Which they thought was crazy. Now all cruise ships have an atrium down the middle. They’re floating buildings. The Allure of the Seas has, I think, an eight or nine deck atrium in the middle. It’s so big they have it divided into zones. Central Park and all that with foliage and trees. It’s a whole thing.

Now, this ship was never built because they had a big scandal in the Caribbean market. Plus, that was the oil crunch worldwide in the early ‘70s. I don’t think it would have been built with an atrium had they let it go ahead. Structurally, I don’t know, they do it now. On ships that are 283 thousand tons. I don’t know what holds them together either for that matter.

A: Someone figured it out I guess. They were willing to change their methods.

S: The technique of building the ship in the old days — the decks were curved from side to side, and from fore to aft. And that was because, you were building a truss. The crest to crest distance on ocean waves is such that you have to have a very strong structure to keep the ship from bending. That was because they didn’t have the right steels. The QE2 — the Queen Elizabeth Two, they used better steel and those decks were flat. That made a huge difference in fitting the cabins because you didn’t have to deal with this constant curvature fore and aft and side to side when you did wood work and all the trim. It made the ship less expensive to build. By quite a bit. I found that out and then, I also had an outside elevator on the cruise ship and they said well, that’s totally nonsense because the ship is moving all the time. Now, some of the ships do have outside elevators.

The Queen Elizabeth II [Source: http://www.qe2.org.uk/pictures_exterior.html]

Going back to the planes that I designed for King Fahd. That had an indoor operating elevator — a three deck elevator. At first, the Boeing engineers at said you can’t do that. They went down to Texas where the plane was being outfitted and had to cut through the bell frames and the decks. [Eventually,] they created a floating three deck steel frame for the elevator to go up and down in, buffered by big rubber bumpers so it was all self-contained and that worked fine. I think it’s the only operating elevator on board a flying airplane still.

“You have to unlink social from technical to get this kind of thing done. Then, you have to feed it back into the social milieu.”

On Inspiration

A: Is there anything feeding your ideas? I mean a lot of these things, it sounds like you just imagine. Is there any input?

S: Well, having an education in industrial design [helps] but I keep up with the current technology. What I do is learn how things are made and then, I can synthesize that manufacturing process for an imaginary object. When I used to work at Philips (in the NatLab), I was hired to come up with ideas for products five, six, seven years out. If you work ahead of the technology curve with engineers and technicians, you can come up with ideas that are completely silly in terms of the present. If you held up an iPhone back then and told them it was a 5 or 8 [megapixel] camera, they’d say you’re out of your mind. I would do these photographic renderings almost like a magazine ad, showing my idea in situ and these Dutch designers, some of them, they couldn’t process how you did that. Their brains wouldn’t wrap around the fact that you could imagine something in great detail, make a photographic image of it and then, present it to the management so they could get a feel of what’s coming down the pike for competition.

Syd’s designs for US Steel [Source: Gavin Rothery]

A: Right? And do you think that’s worked to your advantage?

S: Oh yeah. I had the account for twelve years and I would fly over there. The design director hired me specifically because I was I was not Dutch, first of all. He internationalized the department as soon as he took over. He hired designers from Spain, Italy, France, Canada, myself, Germany to de-Dutchify essentially, the design department. Now, it’s much different, they’re much more international. The young crop of designers, back then, in the early ‘80s. well, ‘70s. The education of design in Europe was very structured. The idea was to wait until the engineers made it work and then you made it look as good as you could. That was sort of the trap. Now, it’s more let’s make it look a certain way and then have the engineers make it work. Bang and Olufsen were the first European product designers that used that approach. They said we want a CD player that’s only two inches thick. And they made it work. That’s why the Bang & Olufsen line was so advanced. It was magical.

“The embarrassing part is, the technology is moving so fast that science fiction is — you can buy it at Best Buy.”

On Speculative Design

A: But I feel like that’s a constant struggle for designers. To think, as you said, rationally about the present, what can happen now, versus actually trying to create something that could move us into the future.

S: If you go back to World Fairs and you were being shown the picture phone or the flat screen TV, behind it was a huge computer feeding that image on a projection. On the wall, it looked like a flat screen because they’d have a return behind. [They’d present it as if] this is the way it’s going to be in the future and now it is. Fifteen, twenty years later.

You have to unlink social from technical to get this kind of thing done. Then, you have to feed it back into the social milieu. And that’s the tricky part because if you’re doing a product, everybody has to like it and buy it. The difference between designing for industry and designing for movies is that, for industry, you actually have more of a chance to pre-load your recognition factor with the public. You don’t have that in movies, it has to explain itself visually pretty much instantaneously. You have to over-design, make it look really fantastic, past the point where you’d really have to do that in real life.

A: When you say pre-load, what do you mean by that? Through marketing?

S: Advertising. Again the whole iPhone, iPod — that whole technology. Twenty years ago, I don’t think you’d be able to sell it. A camera should look a certain way. You still see single lens reflex cameras for sale, they’re digital now, but they still look like a camera. An iPhone does not look like a camera. The camera part is sort of an addition to what else it does. The technology has shrunk to the point where you can do that. You don’t have to have a dedicated mass of stuff to make a camera anymore.

I’ve worked with clients creating an elaborate series of ideas that were never used because they were never meant to be used. They were meant to be used as leverage for a whole other end product goal than actually producing a solution to that problem. I worked with a Japanese multi-billionaire in Kobe on a project. and the project images are in one of our books. The idea was to create a futuristic, I hate that word but it’s common parlance, to create a world that was relaxing, different and imaginative. That wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was to prove that he was supportive of the city of Kobe and wanted to become Mayor.

A: Did you dig that up in the beginning of the project or later on?

S: No. I mean I designed a four-masted sailing cruise ship, I designed a car series. I designed the whole layout of a theme park and why it was that way. It was literally never used because it was never meant to be.

A: How do you feel about that when it doesn’t get used?

S: Well, I get paid. And it’s — you know, you’re twisting your brain around to come up with all this marvelous stuff and that’s sort of what I do.

A: Right. It almost has its own life in just inspiring people.

S: Yeah and it makes another portfolio piece. In the next book we have, it will go in. [laughs]

A: What do you think the advantage of speculative design is?

S: The embarrassing part is, the technology is moving so fast that science fiction is — you can buy it at Best Buy. Only maybe five, six years away from when it was considered fantasy. So a lot of science fiction movies now are circulating around interpersonal, social issues, because the technology part of it is really not that fantastic anymore. The general public media does a very good job of explaining, for a lay audience, some of these exotic technologies. You have a much wider recognition of what is, in fact, futuristic and what is current. That makes it very tough when you’re designing a science fiction movie.

A: So you think we’re just going to run out of ideas? We’ll hit a limit where everything’s possible?

S: The movie business is changing into something you can’t do at home. The next big thing is spherical, 3D, holographic projection. Now the Oculus system, you could duplicate that sitting in your living room with enough computer power behind you which is not a problem. But to sit in a theater and look all around you and here’s this spherical project. It is a whole different theatrical notion than looking at a flat screen with a picture on it.

I don’t know how directors are going to treat that because now you’re dealing with vista, you’re not dealing with looking through a window. It’s going to be a whole different way of making a movie. You can’t do a close up and have the face floating over your head like fifty feet from chin to forehead because that’s idiotic, it’s just not right. It’s going to be an interesting challenge.

On Movies

A: Do you think that will have an impact on your work with movies?

S: Well, I’ve already done painted pictures of three dimensional projection, in a frame, not spherical. People are used to going to a planetarium which is spherical projection, but now, you overlaid that with actual moving image of real life or real vista or whatever it happens to be.

A: You probably have an oculus.

S: No, but I’ve experienced it several times. It was 2k, not 4k and they’re going to 8k. Because in the 2k, you still see pixilation.

A: Do you think the VR stuff is going to be a positive shift for the movie industry? or even for our reality?

S: I don’t know. I mean, would Big Momma’s House 2 be helped by higher resolution? They’re movies, you know. You have to deal with who’s going to pay a ticket to go see it. Your different demographics demand a different level of sophistication. It’s a business. Like one of the moguls once said, “If you want to send a message call Western Union, we’re not in the messaging business. We’re in business to entertain people with a visual medium.” That’s a big difference. I’ve gotten scripts mailed to me and the central message was this movie is one that has to be made.

A: So no movie has to get made?

S: Not really. No. It’s a business. If enough people agree that it’s a good business risk and it’s a huge risk business, they go ahead and make it. It has to be promoted. I worked most recently on Elysium with Neill Blomkamp, distributed by Sony. The distribution pre-load publicity wasn’t really very well done. Worked recently doing the placeholder, distant view of the city for Disney for Tomorrowland and that wasn’t promoted well either and it didn’t do very well.

Syd’s rendering for Tomorrowland [Source: SydMead.com]

A: Yeah, I saw Tomorrowland. The visuals were fantastic.

S: They are. Yes, it should have done much, much better. But they didn’t do widespread print media. The trailers started to run about a month before the movie opened, four weeks. That’s not enough.

A: Right, it’s a different kind of pre-loading that has to happen with the audience.

S: Yeah, the competition is intense, plus the fact it was sort of a nice, future movie which is much harder to pull off than everything’s turning to shit. Catastrophe sells because it’s kind of cathartic. If everything’s pleasant, wonderful and glowing like Tomorrowland was, you’ve got to sell it in a different way. Sell it as conflict against things going bad. That’s why you saw the movie because you wanted to see how bad are things really going to get. Roland Emmerich is famous for this. He’s trashed Washington DC, he’s trashed Los Angeles countless times.

A: People like seeing LA get trashed. That sells for sure.

S: Yes, the old, cultural competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mort Sahl was a satirist, decades, decades ago and [with the] the constant fluff up between San Francisco and Los Angeles, he said “neither one would warn the other of nuclear attack.” [laughs]

A: I feel like LA has more goodwill than San Francisco.

S: It’s a whole different format. First of all, San Francisco is on a peninsula so your choke point is South of the city as it joins the mainland and to get from San Jose to Downtown San Francisco is a bitch. San Francisco airport is an elaborately planned joke. Flying in there, coming in over the Bay, hoping the wheels touch down on dry ground. [laughs] So what you do is you fly into Oakland and you take the transport across to the city. Then you end up right Downtown.

“The reason the car is still competitive with immense traffic jams here in Los Angeles and in San Francisco is because that social contract is not being observed.”

On Public Transportation

A: You mention public transit. There’s a lot of issues around transportation in San Francisco and LA. Even the automotive industry hasn’t moved that far from where it was fifty years ago.

S: I worked on the original design for the BART system train cars. Sundberg-Ferar designed the BART system cars (one of the Bay Area’s main transit systems). I did all of the presentation renderings for that. The off-center windshield on the cab. The original idea was to have a spare cab on each end of the line so when the train would go across the Bay and then it would come back, you wouldn’t have to change the whole train around. You could take the control cabin off the back, install another one on the front and then, and away you go. That never happened because it’s such an elaborate thing.

Photo of Syd Mead and Roger Servick with the Sundberg-Ferar and Henry Ford Museum teams. Syd’s work with Sundberg-Ferar is in the museum’s archives. [Source: Sundberg-Ferar Product Design’s Facebook page]

A: That’s fascinating. And they really haven’t changed all that much.

S: No, they haven’t. They still use the off-center windshield. It’s a signature. In fact, on the ticket that you [bought], the graphic shows that front end, it’s so distinctive. The renderings I did were hanging in the office of the President of the company when it first opened. I don’t know what happened to them.

A: Why do you think public transit isn’t advancing faster?

S: Public transport requires everyone agreeing to a social contract of just being civil. Now, if you lose that mentality of mutual allowance, then people can afford not to [use public transit], won’t. Simple as that. If you’re in your car, and you can listen to the music you want to, the air conditioner, you’re in your own little private capsule. The reason the car is still competitive with immense traffic jams here in Los Angeles and in San Francisco is because that social contract is not being observed. I mean, they have armed police on the trains that come out from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles.

The other pinch point is they’re all unionized employees — the drivers, the mechanics, the infrastructure [team]. Several times, recently in San Francisco’s history, there’s been a transit strike and now, you have hundreds of thousands of people who can’t get across the bay to go to work. Then it becomes very valuable to have a car. Or people share rides. That’s happened several times in the last fifteen, twenty years.

Photograph of original BART train design [Source: BART]

A: Do you think there’s any intersection there between the personal vehicle of the car and the mass transit?

S: No, they’re too completely separate mentalities. Now, autonomous cars [will have an impact there]. The big disadvantage of having a private car is that it sits unused most of the time. Obviously, you’re not in the car more than it takes to get from A to B and then back again. I think there’s always going to be private ownership of an automobile, much like people have horses. It’s an entertaining luxury; a relaxing, fun thing to do. But I think for the actual car market, you’re going to have shared use of those cars. Again, the social contract is implied and that’s critical for them to work. If you climb into the car that comes to your door and there’s pizza stomped into the carpeting, you know that’s going to ruin it. People are just not going to put up with it.

Syd’s Unipod, a personal transport design [Source: Fast Company Design]

A: You talk about that in your work where you always have people interacting and social interactions.

S: My favorite [example from] Star Trek, was one when Leonard Nimoy directed. They come to Earth to bring the whales back and they’re on a BART train or whatever it is. There’s this guy with a boombox and Leonard Nimoy’s character reaches around and does the [Vulcan nerve pinch] and the guy just falls and everybody claps. [laughs] That is the social contract conundrum.

Looking Back

A: What’s been the most enjoyable project to work on?

S: In the movies, oddly enough, 2010. The reason is that I understood what we were doing. When I worked on Bladerunner, it was piece work, coming up with all the different things. I did quite a lot of design work for Bladerunner and I’d see some dailies but not really very much. I didn’t get the sense of the whole movie stitched together until about the second time I saw it.

But 2010, I’d drive down to MGM, have a meeting with Peter (Hyams). I met Arthur C. Clarke at the time. I went on some of the sets and that gave me a more visceral idea of how the movie was being constructed. That made it much more interesting, being in the movie business, as you were.

For design work, probably the most challenging was the 747 because there are so many FAA rules.

“We’ll have floating, little private estates in orbit.”

Looking Forward

A: What do you want to see for our future?

S: Well, how much time do we have? [laughs] We’re going to be able to genetically tailor ourselves — that’s starting now. We’re going to be able to regenerate body parts. We’re going to be able to create new body parts, from your own DNA so there’s no rejection problems. We’re going to solve the gravity problem. In theory, we already sort of know how it works but it’s secret technology. That’s why I know about it…[laughs] See, I cruise YouTube all the time.

We’re going to find out why gravity is what it is because it’s the weakest force in nature and at the same time, it’s the most mysterious. That’s going to be a marvelous thing to control a gravitational field. Then, Star Trek will come true. There was an up and down on the spaceship at all times which is totally, totally, unscientific. And if we can create intensified magnetic fields around a spaceship then, you’re not damaged by the radiation. Hard radiation in space is severe, it’s coming from everywhere.

A: So are you going to go live in space?

S: When I was at Art Center, I designed a space estate — an orbiting space estate and in fact, in this mural (points to mural on the wall), the JTO logo, that’s Jump To Orbit. We’ll have floating, little private estates in orbit.

Syd in his living room showing the JTO mural [Source: Designophy]

But I think the whole social contract is going to be enforced by sheer weight of necessity. If that isn’t maintained, I really don’t know what’s going to happen.

A: In space, you mean?

S: Well, on the Earth. Anywhere. We’re creating some marvelous, marvelous stuff by the minute. There has to be a stable social, economic system to support that so that you don’t have to worry about everything going wrong. I mean the only reason society advanced in the first place is we started to have multi-level series of tasks to do so everybody didn’t have to do everything themselves. That’s the only way it would work. That’s going to continue to be the case on a much more elaborate scale.