“Last but not least, good design is as little design as possible.”
- Dieter Rams

Last night I watched Objectified, the new documentary by Gary Hustwit, who directed Helvetica a few years ago. His new film explores the world of design, specifically industrial design and interaction design. Really, though, the film was more about design thinking and what it is that goes on in a designer’s mind.

The film is a collection of interviews with some of the world’s greatest designers: Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid, Jonathan Ive, Paula Antonelli, David Kelley, and Bill Moggridge just to name few. These designers are behind some of the most beautiful, functional, simple, and elegant objects we see around us everyday, from the mundane to the exalted, toothbrushes to SUVs. The film asks them to describe what design means to them, what questions they ask as designers, what problems they try to solve.

Unless you’re interested in design or a designer yourself you’ve probably never heard many of those names before. This is probably not altogether unintentional. A common theme from all of the interviews was designers’ thoughts centering around people. How will people use this item? How can we make the experience of using the item easier/better for them? Throughout the film, the thing that struck me most was that the designers’ goal was to go unnoticed. They want you to use their products without thought or effort.

“And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they’re not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost un-designed. It feels almost that, well, of course it’s that way, why wouldn’t it be any other way?”
-Jonathan Ive

I began after a while to think it might be that industrial design is among the most humble and under-appreciated occupations on the planet. Very nearly everything we come across in our daily lives was at some point designed by someone and yet we almost never think about that, let alone give them credit.

Another idea that I very much appreciated was the idea that design thinking can be applied to almost any discipline. As David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, put it:

“Design thinking is a way to systematically be innovative.”

Innovation is something it seems everyone is striving for now but very few actually achieve. Could it be that the method for attaining truly innovative solutions in any field has already been discovered, but is as invisible to us as Post-It Notes or hedge-clippers? The film really tries to undo the common misconception that design is merely decoration by showing that it’s really the process of making unnatural objects feel as natural and meaningful to us as possible.

Whether you’re a die-hard design buff, or just a casual observer interested in glimpsing a sliver of the human ingenuity that goes into everything man-made, I recommend you check out Objectified.

You can watch a 90-second, high-def trailer for Objectified here.