Objectified

Just watched a wonderful documentary called Objectified. It is a design film about the relationship between people and objects, chronicled by the designers. It's from the same man who brought us another great film in Helvetica: Gary Hustwit. I loved Helvetica. I saw it last year, when I was at Quinnipiac, in one of my Interactive Digital Design classes, with my favorite professor, Sara Jordeno. Helvetica really opened my eyes to design and made me fall even more in love with typography. Objectified was equally inspiring, but in a different sense - now I can look at the objects around me a bit more critically.

It is a feature length film, and I am tired at the end of the week, so my memory of specifics may be lacking. I realized about halfway through that maybe I should take some notes down of some great quotes, or of ideas that sprang to mind as I watched. There's something so pure about watching, reading, experiencing something for the first time that you can never get back again - the element of surprise and unknowing is gone. One takeaway I got from the film came from a very eccentric yet brilliant designer by the name of Karim Rashid. Karim brought up a memory he has, of when he was a teenager, in his days of "teenage angst" as he describes. When he would sit in his room, gloomy and sulking, looking at this alarm clock of his, of whose design he was so attracted to, would make his problems go away. I can very much relate to this, and I find myself staring at certain objects of mine for long periods of time (not so long, maybe ten, fifteen minutes most). This mostly happens when I am first waking up, on a weekend, or another day when there is no rush to get up. I am so in love with the way objects hang on my wall in my bedroom. There is such cluttered structure to it that I find so appealing. Perhaps it is not so humble of me to be so infatuated with the look, as it is something I created, but it really is something I love. There are different textures, mediums, sizes, dimensions, colors. It is not even so much what it is that is on the wall, but the way in which it is arranged. I am obsessed with clean and beautiful layouts. Just the other day I had such the urge to paint my room red, but then I realized that that would mean having to first remove my wall decorations, and I feared that no matter how meticulous I was, I would not be able to get the look back.

For someone not interested in design, or in the things that surround them, I think you will still very much enjoy Objectified as it invites you to look at things in a different way. Technically, it is a very well made documentary and is very engaging. I am happy to have stumbled upon it. I set out searching for a good documentary to watch tonight, and I certainly found one.

A very powerful verse came at the closing of the film. Describing what he would do with a billion dollar campaign, Rob Walker of New York Times magazine explains that he would "launch a campaign on things you already own, why not enjoy them today? Because we all have so many things that we already have...they're in the closet, they're in the attic." How interesting is that? It makes me want to just dig into boxes and find the things that have meaning to me. He goes on to say that with the threat of a hurricane, or some other reason that would make it necessary for you to quickly grab your things and evacuate your home, what you grab really defines who you are. Very thought provoking. What I would grab, besides my pets, I really don't know.