OBjectiFieD

Gary Husweit's film Objectified, is a fresh look into the design industry, the people behind the products and the process from  conception to completion.  The documentary revisits the quintessential insight of every object we own, everything we see, touch buy and sell, was at one point created by a designer.  It's a true and often overlooked fact that most of the tangibles we come across in our daily lives were once someone's dream. Objectified shows how the process is often a tedious one, and considering how competition can innundate the market, the nuanced details mustn't be overlooked.

The film touches on the different components that make a design successful or fail to do just that.  Good design is "honest" design.  It makes a product understandable.  It is consistent in its features.  It is environmentally friendly. It exhibits as little design as possible.  People often blame themselves when they cannot understand the workings of a product.  This is often times the fault of the design itself.  Design should be visibly "legible" to the user. Any user.

In the movie, Apple computers is coined one of the only businesses to take design seriously.  And really, I can affirm from experience the design is, in fact, brilliant.  Not only has Apple minimized its parts to the bare necessities with the MacBooks, they've created an interface so completely intuitive it doesn't require much to navigate.  One designer featured discusses how a good design really goes unnoticed, directing the sole attention to the function of the object itself. For example, I rarely notice the physicality of my MacBook.  I become oblivious to it and engrossed in what I happen to be using it for.  Plus, it has an amazing light-up keyboard that enables me to even work in the dark!  In good design, form bears no relation to function.  A cell phone is not meant to look like any type of telephone prototype.  It's a small rectangular device whose shape makes no indication to what it actually does.  Another interesting insight made was that of product evolution.  Take the camera, for example.  The shape of the camera has evolved in this continual rectilinear shape.  Its shape originally coincided with the "form follows function" discipline, however, the previous form was designed form film.  Nowadays, digital cameras saturate the market, meaning no use for film.  Yet, the same same prototype is still being reproduced.  It begs the question of whether or not design has really come all that far if manufacturers and designers are still creating products that don't bear a need for the original shape.

The film also revisits the current dilemma about products and their degree of sustainability.  One designer posits that any object whose shelf life is under 11 months must be completely disposable.  Ironically, most products are made for the 10% of the population that don't need more products, while 90% of the population do not have basic products and services to sustain the essentials of life.

It's obvious from the film just how much time, consideration, collaborating and prototyping goes on in the design process.  Objectified shows are designers, generally speaking, are thoughtful in their approach and have a genuine intention to make life better, more efficient, more convenient, more functional.  That really is the purpose behind design anyway, right?