Hi, Idil, 

Last night, I spent the evening on the couch with my dog, Freddy. We
idled away the hours reading, eating sandwiches, and watching the Steven
Seagal action thriller Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995). Your query
must have been in the back of my mind. I woke up to jot down a few
notes, and I’ve been thinking and revising them all day, so this is a
long post.

Responses so far cover an interesting range of resources, including
many films. Edgar Rodriguez-Ramirez, Prue Bramwell-Davis and others
considered the role that designers and design play in making movies, the
role designers play as part of a production team. Alun Price and others
commented on the role of design in establishing the conceptual and
affective frame of the film through depicted artifacts and technology.
In this sense, design shapes the narrative world and the implicit
back-story. Amanda Bill, Arno Verhoeven, and others provided books and
theses as resources on the question.

Viveka Weiley focused on the role of designers and design within the
world of the movie itself. This is the role an actor plays to depict a
character within the film, enacting a series of actions the character
performs. Terry Kavanagh and Eduardo Corte-Real deepened this issue.
This led me to an issue that no one has yet raised – the film
character who functions as a designer within the ambit of his or her
role even though the film does not describe this character as a
“designer.”

Seagal’s movie raises interesting questions with respect to this
issue. The Seagal film included a mad scientist. The movie is set in the
present day, as James Bond movies are, but the technology is science
fiction. When I woke up this morning to follow the next iterations of
the thread, a few ideas occurred to me. One involves a taxonomy of
science fiction films or films involving some form of science fiction
that represents designers and design.

A preliminary effort to shape such a taxonomy suggests that most films
do not explicitly represent most designers as in a role that describes
them as designers. Design work is hidden within or behind the on-screen
representation, even though the character has been a designer.

In science fiction films or films with science-fiction-like plots
involving future technologies, many scientists serve as designers after
developing the science behind the technology. Within the story, they
design and build tools based on their scientific work. Some design the
laboratories where they work. Some even design and build secret retreats
or cities, such as the villains in James Bond movies. But this is
usually the back-story. By the time of the action represented in the
film, everything is built. While the representation of the designer with
the character type is explicit, along with the representation of
completed artifacts, the design process is implicit and invisible.

Many science fiction films represent technology designed by scientists
as part of the science. The technology seems to arise in due course from
scientific thinking rather than being a case of applied technology based
on prior scientific work. These films generally do not represent the
many steps from idea through different stages of scientific inquiry to
experimentation and testing. Someone must design the experiments and the
laboratory equipment to conduct them, then design the artifacts or
creations that come from experiments and tests, as well as design the
final artifacts, delivery systems, and service or maintenance systems.
Films often show an army of mercenaries and henchmen helping the
scientist to carry out his sinister plot. The same films suggest a
single scientist or perhaps a scientist with an assistant or two doing
the work of creation, invention, technical development, and production.
In real life, the kinds of technology we see require teams of
scientists, teams of designers, and groups of engineers and
technologists working across several years with multiple suppliers and
manufacturers at each stage.

A few examples suggest the larger situation. Victor Frankenstein
creates his monster in more than one hundred film renditions based on
Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. In straightforward renditions, variations,
sequel horror films, and even comedies, Dr. Frankenstein works in an
isolated laboratory, often on a mountain outside a peasant village,
where he would himself have had to design, build, and maintain the
equipment for his lab. This is so in the first Frankenstein (1931)
starring Boris Karloff; in Frankenstein (1994) starring Robert de Niro
and Kenneth Branagh. It is the case in variations such as Frankenstein:
The True Story (1973) with Leonard Whiting and Michael Sarrazin; sequel
horror films such as Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1943) starring Lon
Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi; or comedies such as Young Frankenstein
(1974) with Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle.

One sees a bit more of the design process with equipment and supplies
being shipped and helpers at work in the film adaptations of the 1896 H.
G. Wells novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. First filmed as The Island of
Lost Souls (1932) with Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi, it was filmed
again in 1977 under the original title of The Island of Dr. Moreau with
Burt Lancaster and Michael York. It was filmed yet again in 1996 with
Marlon Brando, David Thewlis, and Val Kilmer. Even so, there is little
attention to the design process.

A small number of films demonstrate design processes under way, where
scientist-designers or superheroes are seen creating or explaining their
inventions. See, for example, Iron Man (2008, 2010) starring Robert
Downey, Jr., with scenes of scientist, inventor, and technologist Tony
Stark working in the lab. This is typical of some movies based on Marvel
Comics, including the Fantastic Four (2005, 2007) where Ioan Grufudd
plays scientist Reed Richards, but not so in the X-Men series where
design is usually back-story. In the original Marvel comics, of course,
we often saw design process at work, but the narrative unfolding of
Marvel story lines over months and years gave plenty of time to bring
back-story into foreground narrative. We see a designer-inventor at work
in the Blade trilogy (1998, 2002, 2004), where Kris Kristofersson plays
Whistler, an inventor and father figure sidekick to the half-human,
half-vampire Blade played by Wesley Snipes.

Interesting patterns should emerge in a taxonomic structure. The
visible ways of depicting science and technology form obvious
categories.

(1) Science: (1.1) known science, (1.2) theoretically probable advances
on known science, (1.3) theoretically possible advances on known
science, (1.4) speculative advances on known science, (1.5)
theoretically impossible advances on known science, (1.6) pure imaginary
science. 

(2) Technology: (2.1) new technology based on known science, (2.2) new
technology based on theoretically probable advances on known science,
(2.3) new technology based on theoretically possible advances on known
science, (2.4) new technology based on speculative advances on known
science, (2.5) imaginary technology based on theoretically impossible
advances on known science, (2.6) imaginary technology based on imaginary
science. 

The time represented within the film forms a third.

(3) Location in time: (3.1) recent past, (3.2) present, (3.3) near
future, (3.4) near-to-far future, (3.5) far future, (3.6) remote future.


Temporal location is significant. The majority of science fiction films
represent the present within a few years past or present. This becomes
clear when you apply the scientific and technological taxonomies to
films that we think of in other genres than science films, especially
action thrillers and spy thrillers. For example, some technology in the
Mission Impossible films (1996, 2000, 2006) or the Batman movies
involves categories (2.1) new technology based on known science, (2.2)
new technology based on theoretically probable advances on known
science, (2.3) new technology based on theoretically possible advances
on known science. In contrast, the technology in Under Siege 2 (1995) is
(2.4) new technology based on speculative advances on known science. Val
Kilmer’s rendition of The Saint (1995) blends all these kinds of
technology. 

We also see this in some renditions of the past. A good recent example
is the Western comedy adventure Wild, Wild West (1999), starring Will
Smith and Kevin Kline in a remake of a 1960s television show. The
improbable technology shown in the film never happened and likely never
could have done. The film is sometimes described as “steam-punk” for
its rattling, clanking reimagining of a past that looked toward an
unlikely future. You can read about this kind of world in a
science-fiction detective novel by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss
titled The Two Georges (1995). Like comic books, science fiction novels
allow a narrative development of alternative technology, though we do
not often meet the scientists and designers who build it in these
novels. The genre of alternative history is especially good for this.
Here, however, we can think our way through categories that enrich a
taxonomy that may help us to understand the role of design and designer
in science fiction movies.

There are probably other categories one can find on careful inspection
of enough movies. For example, one might consider (4) Depiction of
Designer Role: (4.1) Explicit, (4.2) Implicit, (4.3) Blended mode –
I’m not satisfied with this, but it is a probe toward framing
central issue in understanding the role of the designer within the world
of the science fiction film. 

Then there is the role of designed artifacts. People have been writing
about this as “design,” but this is not the design process, shown
infrequently. It is the use of designed artifacts to shape the world as
narrated by the film and the world as the characters within the film
experience it. This is the material culture of the depicted world, the
world of artifacts that shape the lifeworld within which each character
lives.

One of the interesting categories of film involves films that show the
future as it was seen from the past. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
and Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) are good examples of this, as is the
1936 film version of H. G. Wells’s 1933 novel Shape of Things to Come.
In contrast, the futures of Stephen Spielberg’s AI (2001), The Fifth
Element (1997), or Blade Runner (1982) are distant enough that we cannot
yet say of these worlds that “the future isn’t what it used to
be.”

Anyhow, this is as far as I’ve been able to get. As you can see,
there is lots of movie watching around our house, with much reflection
on how movies shape and draw us into the lifeworld they depict. This
conversation takes place at intersection of philosophy, social science,
and media, involving such questions as your query on the role of
designers and design in science fiction movies.

The art of film is to create a narrative world into which we can
imagine ourselves and find our way. While your query involves the roles
of designer and design in science fiction films, the larger query must
embrace the nature of how film does this. The philosophers Paul Ricoeur
and Stanley Cavell offer a great deal of value here; Riceour in the way
that narrative builds a world, and Cavell specifically on the medium of
film. We’ve got a third member of our household who works with film,
Ditte Friedman. Ditte uses hermeneutical phenomenology to examine the
lifeworld of film genre and existential analysis to draw out the meaning
of what she finds. She studies other genres than science fiction, but
the methodological perspectives can be used usefully to explore any
genre.

Whether one is considering the designer in science fiction, the
existential hero in the Western, the front-line soldier or the flag
officer in war films, a different kind of narrative world flows from
each set of premises one might imagine. A robust taxonomy generates the
opportunity to develop appropriate analytical frames. One can also look
back to other kinds of analytical and structural frames. Vladimir Propp
and Algirdis Greimas shed much light on folklore through their
structural approach. In his analysis of theater plots, Georges Polti
developed a schema of thirty-six situations that he argues cover all
possible plots and sub-plots. It’s not necessary to assert that any
such schema suits all films, but the effort helps to clarify useful
outlines for understanding.

Film communicates many forms of content, across a wide range of genres
and styles. We need several methodological approaches to understand
them. Even within the genre of science fiction, there are many
approaches, styles, and forms. Placing films in different taxonomic
frames will develop useful understandings.

One can adapt methodological resources from several fields that focus
on interpretation, and I’d suggest looking at the work of authors such
as Cavell and Riceour, as well as authors whose work involves creating
conceptual tools and structures for interpretation such as Propp,
Greimas, and Polti.

Before closing, let me suggest a useful web site for film resources. It
has a wide variety of features, including filters that allow you to sort
by genre, plot summaries (not always good, but often reasonable), and
even trailers. Much of the information is available on the open, public
site. There are additional features available on a related premium site.
The URL is:

    http://www.imdb.com/

For plot summaries, Wikipedia is often a good source. Though far from
perfect, you usually get a good view of how people see the film, and
some articles are quite rich in details with links to good resources.

Best regards,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design 

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IDIL GAZIULUSOY wrote:

—snip—

I’m looking for resources on the role of design and designer in
science fiction (movies). I’d appreciate your suggestions.

—snip—