Alex McDowell – Design is a sharp knife
Discover the work of Alex McDowell, renowned designer who collaborated with David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, and Terry Gilliam. His notable films include “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Man of Steel,” “Watchmen,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Fight Club,” and “Minority Report.”
Alex McDowell is a renowned designer with 30 years of experience, known for his collaborations with directors like David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, and Terry Gilliam. His notable films include “Fight Club,” “Minority Report,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Man of Steel,” “Watchmen” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.
He is the creative force behind Experimental Design and the director of the World Building Institute. McDowell specializes in using design and storytelling to create new visual languages and transform complex ideas into coherent narratives, these were the topics covered during his talk for our Design Probes format, excerpts of which can be found here.
McDowell argues that design, when allied with storytelling, can break through the outdated silos of various industries and create a common language to navigate complexity. Citing philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, the speaker highlights the current lack of cohesive narratives in a rapidly changing world. Historically, storytelling transmitted complex knowledge across generations, ensuring survival and continuity. However, the advent of the printing press shifted storytelling to a linear, author-centric model, which limited the collaborative essence of oral traditions. By contrasting this with jazz, where collaboration creates evolving and sophisticated outcomes, McDowell advocates for world-building through collaborative storytelling. This approach, he suggests, can generate more nuanced solutions to modern problems, emphasizing the importance of collective creation and generative design in understanding and addressing the complexities of the current era.
The film “Minority Report,” directed by Steven Spielberg, presented an unprecedented approach in the film industry by beginning without a script. Spielberg chose to prioritize world-building over a predetermined narrative, creating a detailed future society set in Washington DC, 50 years ahead. This innovative method involved developing the film’s world from a brief concept, resulting in a dynamic, symbiotic process where the environment and narrative evolved together. This collaborative and iterative process enabled the incorporation of cutting-edge research from various fields, including technology and urban planning, leading to groundbreaking elements like the vertical car chase sequence. The film’s development showcased how detailed world-building could drive storytelling and foster innovation, with numerous ideas from the film later influencing real-world technologies.
Civil engineers too must embrace interdisciplinary innovations and technologies to shape the cities of tomorrow. This forward-thinking approach involves imagining future urban spaces and threading those ideas back to inform present practices. A significant project, inspired by the American Society of Civil Engineers, created an immersive, interactive game space called Meta City. This fictional, yet data-driven city projected 50 to 70 years into the future, challenged engineers to rethink urban development, considering aspects from climate change to resource management. This project, now used in over 50 U.S. schools, serves as an ideation tool, encouraging engineers to envision radical possibilities such as floating cities and self-sufficient vertical farming. By integrating storytelling and media, this approach redefines the narrative of engineering education, emphasizing the complexity and creativity required to design the cities of the future.
Building a storytelling for the fictional world is completely different than building it for the real world, for which designers use their imagination but do extensive research, go on the field, invest in data gathering, all to be sure that what they are building anticipates future changes in terms of materials, environment, technologies and so on.
When it comes to imagining fictional, alternative worlds, McDowell uses the example of “Man of Steel”, in which he developed a fictional language based on the 200,000 years history of Crypton. According to him, that language had to reflect a philosophy, a logic behind its development, and rules the designer had to build from scratch for that specific world. To answer the initial question, it would be easy to assume that the creation process for this type of product is 100% imagination, however McDowell himself admits his experience has taught him that a logical foundation is what will make a fictional world truly compelling.