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The US Air Force, commissioned him to paint a recruiting poster depicting the Stealth bomber ― a project so secret that it may or may not exist. As a result, Mead was supplied with no models or plans from which to work. He would make some drawings and show them to the Air Force officials and they would say – well, they couldn't say if it resembled the bomber which may or may not exist but could he make the fins a little bigger and move the cockpit forward a little? And he would ask, 'Is that what it looks like?' And they'd say, We can't tell you. The final, full-colour poster was printed in a special edition to meet public demand.
Mead's commissioned work includes designs for customised private airplane interiors. Clients such as King Hussein and King Fahud of Oman enjoy travelling in style and the designer panders unashamedly to their aesthetic lunacies. The interior of one 747 was modelled to resemble an l8th century English manor, complete with marble floors and oak doors. Another 747 sports its own jacuzzi with jewelled star-charts on the ceiling. "It's the upper end of the market," Mead says.
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The things that will really matter Tomorrow, he insists, are the things about which we're becoming the most blas??: electronics, computers and information.
"The manipulation of information – we haven't been able to do this before on this massive a scale. You can take a computer and produce theoretical designs for industry and then do part-trial breakdown runs, all in theory. You can design a part, run it through its tests in, say, an operating engine and have a very real feeling for how it is going to operate without actually making anything at all. Thirty years ago that would have been magic.
"We tend to live, unfortunately, with all the results of the mistakes of the past to date. You can't get rid of everything at once, short of a natural disaster, so you have to adapt. So you can think up a whole new concept and apply it or you can do a clever lob of retro fitting.
"For instance, maybe people can go to work not by cars but by electronics. Which isn't a new idea but it's becoming more possible because of the way we're organising work. Other than manipulative labour, work is tending to be the processing of information that's available from within a closed network, which is what a corporate system is. You can work from anywhere that you happen to be as long as you have access to that network. So if you have middle-management people working in judgemental positions, they really don't have to go to work. All they have to do is tap into the network and they can do their lot. That, for instance, might also be a way of getting rid of so much traffic."
The thought of a 21st century society still plagued with traffic jams: it's that same blend of past and future again. Syd Mead, 54, leans back in his chair and contemplates the futureworld nine-to-five with relish.
"People have been the same for thousands and thousands of years," he concludes. "They just use different tools. The nice use of technology would be to keep the human side of things a little bit nutty, a little bit random and let machines take care of the drudgery – that would be the most ideal, optimistic track. A writer like Philip K Dick predicts things going wrong, but you really do have to take that chance."
-- December 1987
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