A possibility of the impossible: Blade Runner as a didactic narrative on design

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is a designed adaptation of a kind. Adaptation within the framework of design is always understood as appropriation, or rather as a psychological and social interface between the user and the used, i.e. between the individual and the collective. And precisely as the interface between Dick’s novel and the audience, works Scott’s adaptation. As a Royal College of Arts student, Scott is aware of philosophical and methodological meanings of design. The film is thus a deeply and precisely shaped visual narrative. Scott’s mission was to design a new work of art rich in maniristic technological inventions, odd hybrid spaces and freely-interpreted characters, in a struggle of his and Dick’s identity, the novel and the film. The film’s dystopia, from technological mechanization and interpretative methodology to the relationship between the human and the artificial, the individual and the collective, is an inseparable part not only of Blade Runner but of design as a discipline in general as well. Scott’s film is thus in a way a narrative on design itself.

Feđa Vukić