In November of 2004, IDSA Chicago hosted a lecture from legendary futurist/designer Syd Mead at Columbia College in downtown Chicago. (See photos from the event here.) What follows is Columbia ID professor Kevin Henry's critique/analysis of the lecture.


Watching Syd Mead climb the stage at the Fergusson Theater of Columbia College Chicago was like reliving that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy's dog Toto draws back the curtain to expose the real man behind the god-like Oz. He was small and unassuming hunched over the controls that created the powerful Oz. Syd was doing the same thing to my head (only in reverse) as I watched him and his partner Roger both dressed in the standard camouflage of businessdom- plain black suit, white shirt and tie- take their seats at a small table and wait for the crowd to gather. I knew that when the lights would finally fade, images of Tron and hazy landscapes would fill the screen.

I had expected something more extreme like a white suit and designer tattoos ala Karim, or a shaved head and funky L.A. threads, or at least a pair of designer eyewear. Had I seen this man before me in another context, say on the Red Line or more likely hailing a taxi on Michigan Avenue he'd have been invisible. Here was the legendary Syd Mead on tour with a single DVD in hand (his presentation) and boxes full of books to sell. Syd Mead 'unplugged' more or less. Or so I thought.

Syd's partner Roger Servick, also an industrial designer, seemed to be in charge of keeping things organized. The two men sat quietly at the table on stage chatting with anyone willing to engage them as the room slowly filled. Once we hit the bewitching hour of seven-thirty with a nearly full auditorium, the lights dimmed and the show began.

Syd stood behind the podium and launched a presentation from a small borrowed iBook. His mythical logo faded in to start a show authored in Adobe After-Effects. This was not Director or even sophisticated Flash animations-- this was all fades and atmosphere; a presentation no fancier than that authored in PowerPoint in terms of its pyrotechnics. This was my first clue of the evening. I had heard that Syd was up on the digital technology and knew that most of his time was spent working as a concept designer (more on that later), so I assumed we were in for a lavish production full of special effects- Syd Mead Reloaded. We weren't. What we got was a down-home look into the myth that Syd has become, a myth he himself has carefully crafted. A visit to Syd's website and a click on the biography link confirmed my belief. It was all there in full bloom on a website which looks like a very well tended garden intended to bear fruit (i.e.: fame and cash).

So if you are asking yourself: "why is this guy giving Syd such a hard time?" Trust me I am not. I was taken with his ease in front of the crowd and his ability to articulate his philosophy more with clever asides than overwrought or convoluted statements. I could see that Syd's ability to visualize the future dovetailed perfectly with American manufacturer's need to sell dreams and ideas at mid-century. He saw an opportunity and filled it: he took his skill set and worked it to his advantage and never looked back. His career in many way spans the diversity of the profession. His life's work could serve as a great case study: a person whose career parallels the various paths that this profession has trail blazed.

Our collective design memory may be too short when it comes to a person like Syd Mead. Industrial design began in this country through a direct connection to theater and set design. It was those early pioneers that realized that the drama of American life could be realized in the products they were holding if only someone would come in and give them visual life and functional clarity. Bel Geddes and Dreyfuss to name but a few both started out in theatrical design and soon realized the opportunity their skill set could provide to industry. Syd in many ways took that beginning and returned it to the source (more on that later).

He also represents a character very much at odds with the common anonymity of great design. Face it-- industrial designers create products that rarely stick around long enough to get really celebrated by the culture at large. They change constantly: a fact that keeps us all gainfully employed. Sure, the Sony Walkman created a lifestyle that every product since (including the iPod) has both capitalized on and had to conform to, but few people know who actually designed the original product because in this case it was designed by committee-- and I mean that in the best possible sense of the term: a large integrated team.

While an older public might have known the likes of Raymond Loewy they probably didn't know Henry Dreyfuss in the same way (Dreyfuss helped redesign Time but never made its cover like Loewy). While a new public might know Philippe Starck or Karim Rashid, they probably don't know Bill Stumpf or Jonathan Ives or any designer (partner or otherwise) at the hundreds of great consultancies or corporate offices in this country. That is because most products are not authored or associated with a single individual.

While we have the Michael Graves phenomenon (an architect with a crew of industrial designers to interpret his sketches and ideas and turn them into realities) it is partly the result of the American mindset to believe that if an architect can design a building, he/she must be able to design a toaster. It's also of course the brand mindset that believes if a famous name can be applied to a product it brings trust, familiarity and cache (a.k.a. cash-aye). I wonder how many Portland residents have brought any of Michael Grave's products?

Syd Mead is a brand of sorts; a concept he seemed to realize early on and nurture. He is also a kind of rock star- doing music I'm not hugely excited about but I know the name and I know the look and so it was extremely difficult for me to be able to step back and really assess this guy. Seeing Syd unplugged gave me this feeling that was both nostalgic and annoying. While I could not deny he has some awesome chops when it comes to visualization, I still came away feeling he was more Oz than anything else. But was it me or is Syd really more than meets the eye?

He began the actual presentation with a sepia-toned image of himself as a baby: a picture only a mother could love. In his own words he was a Depression-era baby who displayed a talent for drawing early on. Born in the Midwest, the son of a minister, at a time when design hardly registered on the national consciousness, he had an affinity for capturing form with a pen. Proof of it was a picture of a boxy automobile done when he was five. This was Syd's first foray into automotive design. What followed next were some adolescent sketches done with an authority far beyond his years. A beautiful line drawing of a girl from the late forties or early fifties that captured both the time period and the girl's mood exquisitely.

Syd, like most great designers, at least knew what he didn't want to do-- even when he didn't always know what it was he wanted to do. A fact he recounted with a very funny down-home delivery as he stepped us chronologically through his history. A stint in the army landed him a job in the Army Corp of Engineers overseeing others and getting good experience in management. From there he went to college presumably on the G.I. Bill- Art Center in Pasadena- where he has lived for a long time. From that point on he has parlayed his visualization skills into a long and varied career.

He talked at length about his first job out of Art Center working for the styling department of Ford in Detroit only to realize that free-lancing provided in a month the same amount he was making in a year. He was doing work on the side for U.S. Steel visualizing cars of the future (which did not necessarily need to be built). Syd left Ford and never looked back. He worked in a series of design related jobs around the Detroit area (according to his website), and at that time turned down an offer from the Loewy office to be the design manager for his NYC office so he could set up shop himself.

In Detroit he freelanced with clients like the technology giant Philips in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Raymond Loewy's Paris and New York offices. His descriptions of the corporate culture at Philips-- where he was viewed with some suspicion as a consultant hired to conceptualize in what is a very engineering-focused culture-- were wonderful stories. This was among the few times he showed products that had actually been manufactured. Towards the end of the presentation he showed a watch concept for a Japanese manufacturer and some large cruise ship concepts. Nothing from that period stood out as either futuristic or all that successful and Syd rarely spoke of the typical challenges designers encounter in getting ideas realized- prototyping, form-giving, ergonomics or the push-pull of the refinement process.

The work seemed to go from ideation sketch to completed rendering and not much farther. It seems at this point that Syd's real calling was coming into clearer focus: visualizing the future. His work for U.S. Steel was pure visualization for a large company trying to sell the capabilities of their material to prospective manufacturers. Syd had arrived at a place where he could envision with a pen and markers and not have to be involved in actually getting the product realized.

I found Syd to be a very compelling storyteller with poignant insights and candid explanations of his design thinking. For example, the watch concept he did for a Japanese manufacturer celebrates that quarter slice of time 6-9 in the morning and the evening before and after which we are consumed in the routine existence of working. His idea was to celebrate it on the face of the clock as a special chunk of time happening twice daily. I found it to be an interesting idea beyond the purely visual but nothing that would actually make me want to purchase the watch. Unless, that is, I knew it was designed by Syd Mead and I wanted a piece of the supposed future.

I admit I did find myself wishing for more physical products and the process required to bring them to market. By this point Syd was talking about his conceptual design work for Hollywood filmmakers- a long and varied career spanning decades. Maybe I am totally missing the point but that seems to be Syd's real legacy: an ability to imagine and illustrate a future that is in fact unrealizable except for on film. My only question then was why is this place full of so many industrial and graphic designers and no filmmakers or production designers? And the second question was what do the industrial designers hope to gain from hearing Syd speak? I say that almost rhetorically but in a strange way I mean it. Of course Syd is a legend and legends always have something to say or just hearing them talk about their lives is sometimes enough. But I kept wondering what does this guy have to teach me about design? The vast majority of what he does has never left the flat surface of a sheet of trace or a computer screen.

As he wrapped up his presentation I was thinking of Syd more and more in those mythical terms: the hero who does exactly what he chooses to do because of his focused power. Syd can draw like few people and this still remains the holy grail of industrial design. I also realized that a big chunk of the audience had grown up on comics and in many ways what Syd does is very close to comics.

Syd emerged as a visualizer par-extraordinaire at a time when visualization in the design world was still perceived as magic- as theater. One need only look at the down-to-earth sketches coming out of offices like Henry Dreyfuss or Brooks Stevens to realize that what Syd did was to elevate the ART (that is to say the magic) of visualization to another level- fantasy. Syd must have realized soon enough that visualizing was a road that led to high places- the power of visualizing was acknowledged and handsomely compensated regardless of what came out of it.

Towards the end of the presentation, Syd took the audience inside the Sultan of Brunei's fantasy jet. He threw out rough figures of costs incurred to have Boeing engineers redesign the superstructure thereby giving the plane larger windows and uninterrupted vistas from the skies. Syd focused on the interior work with its visual references to British game rooms, Arabic tracery and high tech fantasy. With this project Syd was now a visualizer of the rich and famous: anyone wanting the future could hire him regardless of the context. And he seemed to relish the memory of working on this project and the glamour it accorded. In fact Syd seemed to enjoy the idea of creating fantasy objects that created certain experiences far more than specific products. The theatrical aspect of Syd's work became more apparent with every project he presented. Wrapping up the presentation, he showed a number of designs for large sailing vessels and again the purity of the visuals seemed the most critical rarely commenting on design programs, budgets or refinements.

Syd's version of the future hovers somewhere between the cartoon phoniness of the Jetsons and the fantasy provided by skilled 19th century American landscape painters taming the uncharted reaches of the wild west with a paintbrush- bathing everything in the calming golden light of classicism. Gone from these landscapes was the carnage of the native populations focusing instead on the inevitable westward expansion. Syd's painted future is also a kind of fantasy space where global warming and the downside of technology does not undercut the warm glow of progress at least as envisioned for U.S. Steel and others. The vehicles travel on air with no visible signs of fossil fuels.

Syd's connection to cars is everywhere. His entire professional life as told on his website has a running commentary of the cars he was driving at each turn. Cars and the whole fantasy realm of travel have consumed this visualist for the last half century. The irony is that no car he designed seems to have ever made it into production except for the die-cast cars in matchbox versions. Even Loewy realized the Avanti.

Syd has successfully merged a Victorian romanticism with 21st century technology which, if one crunches the numbers, lands us squarely in the present. His work manages to drop us into a comfortable and familiar version of the future where people are driving vehicles that float on air past ancient Inca-like monuments. It is no wonder the Italians love him: they live in these ancient cities amidst their own ruins reinventing the present (really the future) against a constant backdrop of the past. It is a kind of visual soundtrack for progress.

This is the conundrum of Syd- a fact he himself repeatedly addresses: "you have to mix the known with the unknown and provide the viewer with something the public are comfortable with while adding new elements or updating things." This is a classic formula for design: introducing the new with linkages to the familiar past. In fact an entire exhibition devoted the strangeness of the familiar has been touring major museums in the U.S. and Europe over the past three years curated by Andrew Blauvelt from the Walker in Minneapolis with essays by Aaron Betsky and others with much the same premise albeit a new spin.

So this brings us around to the question of what really is Syd's contribution to design? This is partly answered by his own recent past. Bladerunner certainly established a template that all Sci-Fi films now attempt to replicate (a fact not lost on Syd). But Syd himself spends most of his time as an artist-in-residence creating 'artwork' for galleries and lecturing about his life.

The power of the visualizer in design still remains the core skill we sell regardless of how that visual idea is manifested. While Syd's skills found their securest home in the realm of pure fantasy ala Hollywood it is certainly doubtful that Hollywood would have even taken notice if he had not cut his teeth in Detroit and made a name there. Which brings us full circle on the American century that was: Detroit cars and celluloid film- the only two things that could have bridged this enormous country over such a brief period. Syd was there at the height of that golden period when those technologies had not yet merged but when they were extremely comfortable bedfellows. When film was not yet the special effects feast it has now become and cars were not yet the sophisticated experiences they are now (complete with DVD players and monitors- how futuristic is that?)

While Canada is now home to the biggest production of automobiles and most Hollywood films are shot anywhere but Stateside (usually Canada) it is hard to say what it all means. Still Syd is to urban sci-fi visualization what J.K. Rowlings is to scary adolescent sorcerer fiction: brand powerhouses in a very brand conscious culture. As for me I still like my futurism baked: that is to say three-dimensionalized. I'd still take the tinkerer futurist over the pure visualizer (say Bucky or Dean Kamen). I much prefer the idea of gyroscopic computers balancing a two wheel vehicle (even when it means I am more likely to get a parking ticket on the streets of Chicago) than say a floating van powered by an as yet unknown fuel. You can take the reel future but bring me the REAL one!


- Kevin Henry is the coordinator for the Product Design program at Columbia College Chicago. He also designs objects for the domestic environment with an interest in furniture and housewares, and a special interest in the intersections of the hand-made and the mass produced. Additionally, he was recently was awarded a Bronze IDEA for an exhibition catalog he designed with his wife, Anne Dorothee Boehme. Current projects include a book project called 'Toast:
Interviews with Designers about Process'. A transcription of one of the
interviews (Munich-based Konstantin Grcic) will be in the March issue of
Ten by Ten Magazine. You can email him at [khenry at colum.edu]


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