Object lesson

Objectified documents the people and ideas
behind the design of everyday things

DESIGN DAREDEVILS: Apple designer Jony Ive

by MALCOLM FRASER

Following Helvetica, his critically acclaimed documentary on the popular font, Gary Hustwit brings us Objectified, another thought-provoking exploration of the omnipresent yet largely ignored phenomenon of everyday design. This time, his net is cast considerably wider, exploring industrial design in general—the objects that fill our lives, and the people and ideas behind them.

The film proceeds from a premise much less self-evident than it seems—all the things we use in a normal day were designed by somebody. A parade of contemporary designers talk about their concepts, their philosophies and the things they’ve designed, from chairs to computers to an extended, surprisingly entertaining sequence focusing entirely on toothbrushes. If you’ve ever seen the bizarrely fascinating Discovery series How It’s Made, with its behind-the-scenes views of factory assembly, this is the intellectual version, explaining why things are made the way they are.

The film touches lightly on different approaches to design—elder statesmen like Germany’s Dieter Rams and Japan’s Naoto Fukasawa drop gems of timeless traditional wisdom, while New York’s Karim Rashid, looking like a Sacha Baron Cohen parody of a designer in his matching purple outfit and shades, spouts blithely outrageous ADD-era provocations. Generally though, it’s simply an overview of what design means, from highfalutin’ theories to socio-economic context to the plain nuts and bolts of making ideas into objects.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help comparing it to another recent documentary on the unseen background of things we take for granted, Food, Inc. Unlike most critics (96 per cent, according to rottentomatoes.com), I was underwhelmed by Food, Inc., finding it frustratingly dumbed-down and condescending in its insistence on spelling things out for the viewer in For Dummies fashion. Objectified goes resolutely in the other direction, laying down heavy-duty concepts by the minute and rarely slowing down to put them into layman’s terms.

More than once, I found myself thinking about a particularly interesting sequence or quote, then realizing that my reflection was causing me to miss the next scene of the film, which had swiftly moved on to another idea. But although it may leave your head occasionally spinning, Objectified is a fun and fascinating collection of stories hidden in plain sight.

OBJECTIFIED OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JULY 9