Interaction of Form and Design in Objectified

 image from flickr.com

Design is an on-going process in which designers come up with ideas, form, concepts which tries to appeal to the consumers and most of the time improves the lives of everyday people. In the documentary Objectified, director Gary Hustwit introduces the audience to the world of design and shows how people encounter some  basic items people use in their day-to-day lives: the list includes vacuums, chairs, toothpick, toothbrushes, and even the famous Apple Macbooks. Throughout the film the design process can be readily seen like that of design thinking which follows six steps of field research, understanding problem, idea, prototype, feedback, and repeat. One item which they did focus that did follow this step in detail was that of the peeler. One of the designers spoke about a friend who was having difficulty with arthritis in their hands in regards to the pain in using that metal handle peeler. Here the design looked at field research, understood the problem and thought of an idea of using a rubber handle which helped arthritis victims relieve the pain. It is these ideas/itemas which sometimes make the best designs. Davin Stowell one of the designers featured in the film stated that “What we’re really always looking for whenever we design are ways we can improve the way people do things or improve their daily life, without them really even knowing, ever thinking about it.”

The most important problem or lesson for designers is a scene in the film which showed thousands of unused products being trashed and disposed of leaving a huge ecological footprint on earth. That the main problem isn’t coming up with great new designs, but how to make designs in which is environmentally sound. Karim Rashid a designer could have not said it any better than stating “If the average shelf life of a high-tech object is less than eleven months, why on Earth does anything have to be built to be permanent? It should be all 100% disposable. You know, I think my laptop should be made of cardboard, or my mobile phone could be a piece of cardboard, or it could just be made out of something like sugarcane or bioplastic( www.objectifiedfilm.com).”