Movie Review: Objectified

My home office is not organized or well decorated. Just your typical office-size room with builder beige walls and the usual clutter, stacks of paper, books and bills. Don’t forget the post-it notes pasted to just about everything. The only noteworthy thing going for it is the Helvetica movie poster that Clay de Voute picked up for me at The Mayfair Theatre.

Kid safe? Not really.

Gary Hustwit’s previous documentary, Helvetica, was about the most recognizable and used font in human history. Here he focuses on industrial design exploring the every day objects we covet and the people who design them . More importantly, this movie provides an answer to the question “What does our stuff say about us?”.

The movie format, much like Helvetica, is structured around a series conversational vignettes with industrial design superstars such as Jonathan Ive (Apple), Dieter Rams (Braun), Naoto Fukasawa, Karim Rashid and Bill Modgridge (IDEO), and commentary from design critics Rob Walker, Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli (Curator, MOMA). The film takes us through the design process: Johnathan Ive talks about the manufacturing process that goes into making the new Apple unibody laptops, and their need to also design the machinery to make it. A view into the trademark post-it note brainstorming sessions at IDEO and the iterations on the design of the OXO potato peeler at Smart Design. There’s alot more but those are the 3 that struck me the most.

The film outlines design’s role using examples such as IKEA and Target. It touches on the designers responsibility to think about the way products are made and not only how they are disposed of. Alice Rawsthorn rounds it all up quite nicely: “It’s about redesigning every single aspect of a company’s process, from sourcing materials to designing to production to shipping, and then eventually designing a way for those products to be disposed of responsibly. That’s a mammoth task, so it’s no wonder that designers and manufacturers are finding it so difficult.”

Interaction design, and its integration within its objects, is included in the film but it didn’t receive nearly enough screen time. I’m biased, of course. Bill Moggridge, who coined the term, tells the story of designing the first laptop and the mechanical considerations that went into it; and then realizing that the program it ran once he opened the thing was just as engrossing as the object itself, and it to needed to be designed.

What’s unspoken in this film is the role that marketing plays in the endless round of product introductions – the need to goose the bottom line with a new gizmo with a new, marginally better (or not) feature – to satisfy earnings expectations on Wall Street.

The role of design in all this? To create the products compelling enough to seduce us to buy. And then to toss our old stuff to the landfill. And the beat goes on.

If you’re interested in design and how it interacts with us in our everyday lives, add Objectified to your Netflix queue or even download the groovy song from the trailer and the film’s opening credits. It’s called I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool by El Ten Eleven.