Objectified

Gary Hustwit's film Objectified explores the processes, meanings, identity, and properties of design objects. The film presents numerous designs, from little, every day gadgets to larger scale, industrial technologies. Hustwit explores these objects, discovering them from the inside out.

In exploring design, Hustwit has found his belief that "every object tells a story," that every design has more meaning behind it that its mere function or appearance. Rather than remaining with our predisposed ideas of an object, we are encouraged to wonder about its function and how its structure lends to that function. Then we must ask why its function is important in society, or if it is unimportant, why it continues to exist despite a lack of necessary function. These questions lead on to further exploration of how the object was made and who made it. These details will give us insight into the reasoning behind designs, the passion and thinking behind an object.

Objectified takes the viewer through this process of deconstructing design and rethinking it with many objects and many different designers. It is the difference in passion and creativity between these people which is significant in design; innovation and new aesthetics or functions arise not from design itself, but from the designers who pour themselves and their thinking into the objects which then tell their story.