Objectified

Objectified is a documentary about product designing and everything that is associated with it. They travel the world interviewing well known designers discussing about the importance of design, what design is, and how it impacts everyday life.

They talk to many designer such as Marc Newson to the head of IDEO David Kelly to Karim Rashid. They go to Japan, New York, London, Paris and Germany where design is most prominent. Here is what I find interesting that no matter you go, design is like a universal thing. A common thing that designer talked about was the form of a product. Even though they all have different taste in each of their designs, the most important is the form of a product.

They talk about how some forms are obvious like the chair or the spoon but some others are far from that they function. It’s all about how you interact with the product. Example the Dirt Devil (designed by Karim Rashid) is something beautiful to look at that you wouldn’t even think its a vacuum, or even putting it on display on a counter. Whereas the Dyson vacuum is design base on it function, but if you look beyond that, he expresses the function uses colour and symbolism.

The designers also talk about what design is. Most of them say that design is making something perform better, to improve the way people do things or to improve one’s daily life. Some designers talk about design for life. In the world we live in today, we are also chasing for the newest things, and as a designer, you try and design in a way where it won’t be as tacky or old fashioned in the future. They mention how they produce phones that are made to last for age but yet we still chose to buy a new phone every 1 or 2 years. This is also mainly to do with marketing how designer are always design the new ‘new’.

Another issue they mentioned was about mass production. They empathized how industrial design is mass production.  Design uses industry to make serialized good. And these goods are to serve people’s needs. And as designer we are suppose to know these even more of what the user even knows. And after the user stop using the product, where does it go? This was another major topic they discussed. A few decades ago, products where design to last long and therefore a disassembly procedure was not thought of.  Now in a world where we just buy buy buy, the usually household has way too much stuff and we tend to throw out more now and therefore designer have design for a dissemble, to recycle and re use parts – sustainable design.

Designers are not struggling to design products for disassembly.  They already have all these other things to think about like manufacturing, shipping, packaging and then all the design aspect of designing a product and then after its life end, how is it meant to be re cycled for something new? And is it even able to be recycled into anything else?

From this documentary, it was like revision, like everything I’ve learnt so far in design being repeated back to me again, which is a good thing because it’s important that I know all the aspects of design from each corner. I’ve also learnt a lot from this documentary as well.