You might recall that I was pretty excited about the new Gary Hustwit film, “Objectified”, which premiered at SXSW. Well I went to see it last night in the Barbican…
oh Gary, Gary. What happened to the fact in documentary? What was beautiful about Helvetica, Hustwit’s previous film, was that it was very pretty and interesting visually while introducing the viewer to the discussions in visual communications (modern vs postmodern, clean v grungy, helvetica v hand writing etc etc). Oh, and introduced huge chunk of history of typefaces. Now scrape everything after “very pretty and interesting visually” and you’ll get Objectified. And the real issues, like sustainability in design and the fact that most designers get employed by companies to design new and tempting objects to make customers buy and buy and buy – i.e. there’s a intrinsic moral dilemma in this job – are barely touched upon. That’s where the documentary was, but we didn’t get to that in 90 minutes.
And yes Jonathan Ive (Apple’s head designer) appears, but doesn’t have much to say either.
I do aknowledge that I am difficult crowd to please for this particular film. I’m fairly familiar with issues of design (though not so much industrial design), I had my certain expectations (after loving the previous film) and I suffer from the filmmaker’s (or wannabe filmmaker’s) syndrom: I can’t watch documentaries without examining them constantly on account of what could have been done differently – and better. If you don’t know much about design on its conceptual level and/or you’re not making documentaries yourself you will enjoy Objectified and you probably should see it, because the issues are very current and relate to all of us. The fact that everything we look at has bee designed by some one, the fact that 80% of it was designed to make us want to buy it – whether we need it or not and the like.
Just bear with the prechiness (along the lines of my previous sentence).
