‘Every object tells a story if you know how to read it.’

A companion piece to ‘The Genius of Design’ series, Objectified focuses on design practices today and asks some very important questions. This film focuses on how objects are conceived, developed, manufactured and ultimately how they speak to us. It’s about an industry which makes standardised objects for millions of people, be it peelers, post it notes, chairs, etc. Everything in our world has been designed in one way or another, but most of us don’t notice it.

Designers obviously see this process differently: ‘ When you see an object, you make so many assumptions about an object – what it does, how well its gonna do it, how heavy it is, how much you think it should cost.’

We can see how products are developed (using bicycle grips for peelers) and the move from ‘form follows function’ to removing or hiding functions and symbols entirely. In computers and phones everything defers to the screen, the focus is on function, not the design. From the analog to the digital world, familiarity versus innovation.

Designer Dieter Rams rates Apple as one of the few companies who take design seriously by getting the notion of design out of the way: ‘Good design should be innovative, good design is unobtrusive, good design is consistent in every detail, last but not least: good design is as little design as possible.’ So here you have a kind of Good Design Mantra.

Of course the major challenges have been to ‘give individual character to something that is produced industrially’ and how to still make them affordable to the general public. Marc Newson: ‘Of course, I fundamentally believe that something thats well designed should not necessarily cost more. Arguably it should cost less. But the problem is, design has become a word for a lot of companies to sort of add value. Because something is designed, and therefore charge them more money for it. Things will be marketed in terms of design in the future.’ The iphone is a good case in point, well designed, multi-functional and very powerful but it comes at a high cost. So far, his predictions seem to be true although companies like IKEA have tried a ‘good design at low cost’ strategy. I think that in the light of the current financial roller coaster ride, we will have both options.

An most importantly, the film focuses on questions of culture, innovation and aesthetics versus shelf-life, disposability and recycling. Design that avoids becoming landfill and instead teaches buyers to understand the consequences of their purchases. How do designers become culture generators instead of generators of the environment? Mass communication instead of mass production. But how do you make money without a series of disposable products? I think this will be one of the major questions of this century.

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