JKR

This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Alien. It was a film with incredibly innovative and imaginative production design, but how has its vision of the future held up so well, when such design often looks unintentionally comical decades on? Obviously, HR Geiger’s designs for the monsters and alien spacecraft (above) are idiosyncratic nightmare visions which are fundamentally timeless. And the (for the time groundbreaking) notion of portraying a spaceship as a rusty oil rig in space, rather than something white and shiny, set the template for many imitators. But perhaps it’s what the designers chose not to do which has given the film such visual longevity…

I read all the books about the film as a nerdy teenager and one explanation about the design process has stuck with me: the production team looked at every aspect of the astronauts’ lives, from their shoelaces to their cutlery, and attempted to create futuristic versions of these everyday objects. But attempts to update drinking vessels were rejected – square edged beakers don’t fit the contours of the mouth. The design team recognised that some things are as they are for good reason and cannot be improved with restyling. This “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach might fly in the face of the questioning nature found in innovators like James Dyson, but it might offer one reason why this attempt to imagine the future has stood the test of time. Form follows function is an evergreen concept, and one worth following when aiming to contemporise any product styling.