@danasmith

Update: Now streaming on Netflix.

On Tuesday night, San Francisco had its first peek at Objectified, the new documentary about products and the people who design them. The film weaves together the core narrative of product design with evolving topics such as sustainability, meaningfulness, and humanitarian opportunities in a concise, engaging, and at times lucid story. Setting aside for a moment the full-audience guffaw when Karim Rashid came onscreen, the movie is just what I hoped it would be.

Today, however, I’ve seen some tough (but valid) criticism of the film emerge from the SF design community.

Sure, I agree, the film is rife with lofty, idealistic statements. Yes, there is sparse coverage (at best) of the day-to-day topics that weigh on the minds of IDs and IxDs toiling in the trenches. And, alright, maybe a few designers come off a little self-important in the film.

But that’s ok… 

As designers we’re already aware that society is choking on a fount of poor quality, poorly thought out products. We know that the pressure to push out the Next Best Thing before the paint on the Current Amazing Thing has had time to dry is short sighted. We recognize that the vision that attracted many of us to the field in the first place rarely has a home within the Money Machine. We don’t need Objectified to be a manifesto about those things because this film isn’t for us.

This film is for the people who don’t know we exist (professionally-speaking.)

And so, Objectified shows the audience the sofa. It says: Sit back. Let me tell you a story. I’ll have some shiny objects to show you along the way. And maybe I’ll throw in  a little fortune telling if you pay attention.

That’s EXACTLY what we need, particularly from the first film with potential to reflect our profession to a wide consumer audience.

As a profession, don’t we hope the people we dine with, shop beside, and drive behind will, at least for a moment, see that our lives could be better if the products surrounding us were more thoughtful?

Don’t we hope that, at least in some small way, each one of us can help narrow the gap between a vision of what Design could be and today’s reality?

Objectified can help us do just that.

Imagine… A couple strolls into their neighborhood movie rental shop, looking for something to fill the evening. The woman, a child of the second-wave feminist movement, sees a DVD labelled Objectified and thinks, “Huh? Does that mean what I think it means?” So she picks it up. On the case, she sees something she recognizes. Maybe it’s a Karim Rashid soap dispenser from the drugstore or the Dyson vacuum that a friend owns. So they take the DVD home. As they start watching a funny realization dawns; the same one that many of us have also experienced. “You mean someone sits around thinking about each of a million tiny aspects of a product?” Aspects that up until about an hour ago were invisible to them (or at least taken for granted as an output of technology limitations and marketing conceptions.)

It’s practically dreamy, isn’t it!? The more consumers develop a conscious point-of-view about their satisfaction with the objects and environments they are offered and that occupy their life, the better off we’ll be. Until this consciousness reaches critical mass and spreads on its own, I fear the progress we work toward will continue at the same uncertain pace.

Objectified offers us a chance to give progress a kick in the pants. So let’s champion it!