"Objectified" By Filmmaker Gary Hustwit

Gary Hustwit presents an intimate look into the world of designers and their thought processes in the documentary film Objectified. The film is a refreshing look at what goes into design and the direction in which it is and/or should be heading.

This refreshing look from a documentary and film perspective transfers into the way the film itself is shot and presented. The film has a simplistic, almost minimalist feeling. The interviews with designers are personal and within their creative settings, giving the audience a better feel for the designers and how they see the world. The film's simplicity is echoed in designer Dieter Rams’ quote from the film, “Good design is as little design as possible.”

The film evokes a curiosity for form and function as it shows design thinking, process, concept and production. Jonathan Ive describes this curiosity as constant design or “looking at everything around us and wondering why it is like that and not different.” This is what the film did best in my opinion. The film constantly looks at manufacturing and designers designing in an effort to find out why design happens like this and what these designs mean to the people who create them but most importantly who uses them. There is an equilibrium of content and form in which the audience is seeing visually what is been articulated psychologically and verbally. When we hear designer Chris Bangle talk about how the designs we choose to use represent ourselves to the outside world, like avatars, you can’t help but notice more his stylishly designed glasses that compliment his equally stylish BMW which he no doubtably had a hand in designing. Objects aren't just something designed by people used by people. They represent the people who create them, but more importantly the people who employ them.

The film also places an emphasis on mass production which is what design has become about. Sustainability is a big buzz word which designer Karim Rashid puts more eloquently by posing “why does anything have to be built to be permanent?” This means that designs need to be more recyclable and reusable. The planned obsolescence of today’s mass production design is going to harm design in the end, whether it be the ever dwindling resources or the impersonalization of product and audience due to their briefly planned time together.

Like designer David Kelley’s assertion of “design is something that gets better with use”, so does this film. The more you watch it and try to extract from it, the more it unveils and intrigues. The film is a challenge to all current and future designers to get back to what it is to truly design, to give meaning to the human experience of us and our objects, to give our objects meaning and appreciate their inherent use and value and not disregard them just because they are considered old or no longer fashionable. Design is not just associated with the object anymore, but the entire experience, need and emotion elicited from the object's audience. All of this needs to be carefully designed and considered by today's designer. The film is its own object that thoroughly projects this point in its form as defined by its content. It is, in every sense of the definitions conveyed by the film, a well designed film.

“Every object, intentional or not, speaks to who put it there”

- Gary Hustwit

Enjoy the trailer for Objectified (now available on DVD) from YouTube.