Free Association: Production Designer Jeremy Hindle on Building Severance | Figma Blog
Jeremy Hindle’s production design for *Severance* began with a minimal script description—“four desks, large room”—and developed into Lumon Industries’ eerie, emotionally charged world. Drawing on modernist architecture, industrial design, cinema, and television, Hindle prioritized how spaces feel over what they communicate intellectually. His conclusion is that the show’s unsettling power comes from the tension between sterile order, vast scale, and profound loneliness. ## Designing Emotion - Hindle describes his goal as creating an atmosphere that is “stunning and lonely.” - His experience designing hundreds of commercial offices informed Lumon’s corporate environments. - Rather than focusing only on narrative information, he designs for viewers’ “kinetic” responses—the physical and emotional sensations produced by a space. - The sparse script gave him room to build a complete visual language around emptiness, repetition, and institutional control. ## *Playtime* and Architectural Absurdity - Jacques Tati’s *Playtime* was a central reference for *Severance*. - Tati’s film satirizes modern corporate architecture through vast, impersonal spaces and carefully choreographed movement. - Its mixture of comedy, alienation, and architectural scale helped shape Lumon’s uncanny office environment. ## John Deere Headquarters and Lumon’s Monumental Scale - Kevin Roche and Eero Saarinen’s 1964 John Deere headquarters provided a blueprint for Lumon’s institutional architecture. - Its monumental structure influenced the show’s sense of corporate permanence and authority. - The building also inspired the iconic desks used by the Macrodata Refinement team. - Hindle translated large-scale architectural references into environments that feel both imposing and strangely empty. ## Dieter Rams and Controlled Modernism - Lumon’s largely fabricated sets include selected real design classics, including Dieter Rams’s Braun TS 45 and TG 60 wall console. - Rams’s restrained, functional aesthetic reinforces the company’s carefully controlled visual identity. - The inclusion of recognizable industrial design creates a believable mid-century modern world while making Lumon’s environment feel more curated and artificial. ## Lessons from Film Production - Hindle’s work on *Zero Dark Thirty*, his first feature film, strengthened his commitment to constructing large-scale physical worlds. - He used full-scale models to help the entire crew understand how environments would function and remain visually readable. - This experience supported the detailed spatial planning required for *Severance*’s complex office interiors. ## Negative Space and the Scale of *Fargo* - A single still from the Coen brothers’ *Fargo* influenced Hindle’s vision for the scale of *Severance*. - The image demonstrated how negative space can make characters appear isolated and vulnerable. - Hindle showed the reference to director Ben Stiller, using it to communicate the show’s desired balance of composition, distance, and loneliness. ## The Emotional World of *Her* - Spike Jonze’s *Her*, with production design by K.K. Barrett and costumes by Casey Storm, served as another important reference. - Hindle admired the film’s ability to create a complete emotional world through design. - Its coordinated use of architecture, interiors, color, and clothing helped inform *Severance*’s approach to character and atmosphere. ## *Twin Peaks* and Television with Staying Power - David Lynch’s *Twin Peaks* represented the kind of distinctive, enduring television Hindle hoped *Severance* could become. - Although he had not previously been strongly interested in television, the project offered an opportunity to build a world with lasting cultural and visual identity. - Like *Twin Peaks*, *Severance* combines recognizable everyday settings with surrealism, mystery, and an unsettling sense of place. Hindle’s work shows how production design can make an abstract corporate dystopia physically memorable. By combining modernist architecture, precise industrial objects, cinematic negative space, and emotionally charged emptiness, *Severance* turns Lumon into one of the story’s most powerful characters.
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