OBJECTIFIED

Objectified is a film by Gary Hustwit about design, designers, and the objects that they create.  Dieter Rams of Braun and Apple’s Jonathan Ive appear, of course. (See, The Genius of Design below.)  So do thirty other designers, and a couple of supportive critics, such as Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art.  IKEA and Target both get cameo roles as they deliver to us the magic of inexpensive mass produced items that ennoble us, their owners, with the spiritual benefits of good design.  You and I also appear in anonymous walk-ons because in the words of Andrew Blauvelt, “anything that is touched by man, is transformed by man, is by its very nature designed.” The human-built environment is design.

Dirt Devil by Karim Rashid

Karim Rashid works for the “techno-organic world.” As a teenager, he owned a Claritone stereo radio and a Braun alarm clock and through his teenage angst, looking at them alone in his room brought a sense of comfort.  He calls our time the “third technological revolution.” To him, our living room furniture is like a kitsch stage prop. “When I get up from my laptop and my iPod, do I get into a horse and carriage? No.”

Claritone stereo similar to Karim Rashid's.

According to Andrew Blauvelt, the design concept has three layers. First form begets form, the formal logic of form.  Then come symbols and symbolism, the cultural symbols.  From that comes the contextual symbolism of making coffee, for instance, the bigger scenario of the human-object relationship.  The little rituals define the fork and knife.  The vacuum cleaners from Dirt Devil and Dyson extended the horizons for a single-use product into designer goods for display. Ultimately, the Roomba programmable robot vacuum allowed an undreamed of level of hacking as user interaction.

Alice Rawsthorn of the International Herald Tribune points out that if you were a Martian and you came to Earth, you could pick up a spoon or a chair and pretty much get a feel for their purpose.  Now, the digital age removes that.  Objects can take any shape.  This leads to tensions and conflicts in design. 

But objects do not take just any shape.  Some seem intractably wedded to their pasts.

Three principals from IDEO of Palo Alto shared a common theme in their different experiences of design.  "I inherited my father’s leather briefcase and it got better with time and I look to passing it on.  I look to designing things for wearing in versus wearing out.  ... I designed the case for the GRiD “Compass” computer in 1987, the first laptop.  When I got it home I realized that the beautiful case and clever latches were irrelevant to the user experience, so I came to study software interfaces.  ...  "

"... because in that moment it moves you,
you have an emotion"
-- Hella Jongerius

Naoto Fukusawa designs hardware interaction. Subconscious actions develop the mind and soul: design dissolving in behavior. “A very important turning point for me was the term "obsessive sketch" by Takahama Kyoshi, the haiku master. When the poet’s sentences are overly visible the audience may become uncomfortable. Japanese ritual is the opposite.” 

Rob Walker of the New York Times Magazine asks rhetoically, when the hurricane is coming and you have twenty minutes to pack, what do you grab? Not the object that got a great review in some design magazine, but the object that means the most to you.

Paola Antonelli insists that “democritization of design is an empty slogan.” According to Paola Antonelli, “design takes revolutions and progress and makes it into objects that we can use.”

Speaking of his work on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, Jonathan Ive says that the curse of being a designer is always looking at everything and wondering “why does it have to be that way and not some other way?”

Ad hoc design: wine cork as doorstop

Ad hoc design: section of plastic cup as bicycle fender

I want things that do not exist, that you cannot go out and buy, what is going to happen, not what has happened. – Marc Newson.

Within Karim Rashid's apartment

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Knowledge Maps

Documentation is Specification

The Genius of Design

Art & Copy

Start the Presses

The Genius of Design

“For industrial designers, the world is never enough. They give shape and texture to the world to make it livable—indeed, beautiful—for the rest of us. This fascinating five-part documentary examines the art and science of design and the stuff it shapes, from computer chips to cityscapes and everything in between. See the evolution from artisans’ workshops to industrial mass production, and the profound changes it has wrought in our economy, society, and environment.” – from the promotional.

 Acorn Media 2009

In five episodes running 242 minutes, we meet some of the leading designers who gave us our material world.  They are not engineers. They are not scientists.  The Apple computer was the creation of Wozniak and Jobs, of course, but they did not give it the form we know.  Their Macintosh, their iPod, Sony’s Walkman, all of the furniture in an IKEA warehouse, and even the weapons of war achieved materiality because designers thought long and hard about how real people would use these common objects.

“Meet historians, critics, and legendary contemporary designers, including Dieter Rams (Braun electronics), J Mays (Ford), and Jonathan Ive (Apple), who reveal the thinking behind iconic products such as the VW Beetle, the Eames chair, and the computer desktop. Along the way, discover how design has influenced even the outcome of war.”

At a time when – surprising to us, today - German goods were called cheap AEG launched what may have been the first modern rebranding.  They hired Peter Behrens who created a new AEG typeface for both their advertising and their product labeling. From William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement to Dieter Rams of Braun, from Henry Ford to Ford Motor’s J Mays, we meet the people and their works and their critics (mostly favorable).  Produced for Athena Learning by Tim Kirby’s team for Wall to Wall Media, the video is supported by the Athena website (here) which delivers biographies of Raymond Loewy, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzk, Henry Charles Eames, Alberto Alessi, and Philippe Starck.  The videos also show us Joe Columbo, Robin Day, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, Earl Silas Tupper, Verner Panton, Marc Newson, and Michael Graves, among many others.  You may not know the names, but if you ever read a highway sign or sat in a plastic chair, you know their work.  It is not always easy. The graphical user interface was first introduced in 1963.  

Supporting the presentation, the website also delivers a study guide for classrooms, and a booklet with more ideas centered on design failures. 

•  Episode 1:  Ghosts in the Machine: What distinguishes good design from bad design in a consumer product?
• Episode 2: Designs for Living: To what extent is the kitchen in your home “a machine for living”
• Episode 3: Blueprints for War: The British Sten gun was designed as a cheap, easy to manufacture, and ultimately disposable weapon. The German “Tiger” tank was the finest quality motorized cannon possible – and because of that, it could not be produced in sufficient numbers.
• Episode 4: Better Living Through Chemistry: Plastic, for better and worse. Steve Jobs famously said, “You know a design is good when you want to lick it.”
• Episode 5: Objects of Desire: How do you think the challenges of sustainability and limited disposal will affect product design in the decades ahead? Glen Olver Low calls it “Crade to Cradle.”  Instead of being down-cycled, his concept of recycling returns material to the highest level of manufacturing processes.

Michael Graves found his inspiration - in part - at a flea market, where he saw a hand-made stopper, carved as a rooster which sang when the water boiled. The conical shape was dictated by the need to boil water as rapidly as possible.

Previously on Necessary Facts

Objectified: A Film by Gary Hustwit

Art & Copy: How Advertising Changed Our Self-Perceptions

Start the Presses: Typography 

Cities: The Urban Visions of Jane Jacobs
Documentation is Specification