“Alex McDowell: design is a sharp knife.”

The work of acclaimed narrative designer and world visionary, Alex McDowell, has probably touched every corner of our lives. Beginning with an early career at street-style magazine i-D, he quickly moved on to music videos for Depeche Mode and Iggy Pop, record covers for Siouxsie and the Banshees, as well as game design for the BBC, and continues to fall forward even today. 

The incident that started it all was when he put on one of the first-ever live shows by the Sex Pistols at the Central School of Art in London, in 1975. This “transformative” moment has taken him from working with Vivienne Westwood to collaborating with David Fincher on his groundbreaking film Fight Club, as well as devising a window into the future with Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. 

“I'm always drawn to something that's going to be disruptive, and seeing the Sex Pistols on stage for the first time immediately reverberated. I’m here now because of that night.”

Never one to sit still, he also teaches World Building at the University of Southern California, encouraging students to imagine an uncharted and unknown future.

In 2006, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA, a design society, and was appointed Visiting Artist at the MIT Media Lab. In April 2015, McDowell was awarded the BritWeek Business Innovation Award.

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