Hi,
We are running a project about the effects of Sci Fi on industrial design. We would be appreciated if you could help us:
If you happen to like Sci Fi, Which films were your favorites?
Which products or services have you seen in the films that impressed you?
Have you ever been inspired by some of the ideas in Sci Fi films?
thanks in advance
Who is we?
What is the project for?
I am tahmineh godazgar, graduate student of industrial design, art university. This is a project with my friend elahe. we would like to see wether it has the potential to be a thesis project for one of us.
good subhject. Very interesting - Bladerunner has inspired many designs through the years - a lot of stuff came out inspired by the space race. It could be interesting to compare design’s inspiration on sci-fi and sci-fi’s on design
Thanks. you’re right, blade runner was a good example in this case. number of these kind of films are large. That’s why we have asked here from designers to have some keywords in order to narrow down on some case studies.
The effect of design on sci fi would also be interesting.
I think it’s more of a back and forth thing. the zeitgeist is reflected in and responds to popular culture.
You can say that the Star Trek communicator turned into the first cell flip-phone, but I’d call that a stretch.
Bladerunner fashion design was as much an expression of 80’s trends as it influenced them too.
I don’t think a one-way cause/effect argument can be built.
A more interesting thesis would be to track design trends as they fed into sci fi (or mass media) and back into mass produced designs over time.
It was called the Motorola Star Tac, fully descendent from the communicator.
On April 3, 1973, standing on Sixth Avenue in New York City near the New York Hilton hotel, Cooper made a phone call from a prototype Dyna-Tac handheld cellular phone before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. The phone connected Cooper with the base station on the roof of the Burlington House (now the Alliance Capital Building) across the street from the hotel and into the AT&T land-line telephone system. As reporters and passers-by watched, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear. That first call, placed to Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at Bell Labs, began a fundamental technology and communications market shift toward making phone calls to a person instead of to a place. This first phone weighed about 2.5 lb (1.1 kg).[4][5] It was the product of Cooper’s vision for personal wireless handheld telephone communications, distinct from mobile car phones. Cooper has stated that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him to develop the handheld mobile phone.[6] [7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Cooper_(inventor)
Staying with Star Trek, here is an example of the 60’s show still serving as inspiration for current development.
http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/
Visions of the future inspire and attract designers, the difference between a “real” product designer and a prop designer is minmal.
… the difference between a “real” product designer and a prop designer is minmal.
Disney has a great term for the combination: Imagineer