Gary Hustwit - Objectified Reflection

I like the little biography’s on random average everyday people, such as Sam, the “tree surgeon”. He compares gardening to surgery – need precise, clean cuts. “You wouldn’t leave a jagged cut when amputating on somebody, same thing applies for trees”. I like the way they take one persons perspective and use it as a basis for their product, and stepping into their shoes. Thus leading them to design solutions for inconveniences in Sam’s routine. This is how they teach their clients to give them information about the user, instead of “this girl has 3 kids, 40yo, is a teacher”, etc.

One fascinating part of the video is probably the guy who works for Mac, and how he shows that little light to show that the laptop is on standby, and how “if it’s not indicating something, it shouldn’t be there”, which I thought was very clever.

One of the designers mentions that we are now in the phase where the form bares absolutely no relation to the function, which I partially disagree with, because most of the time, you look at a product and you know exactly what it does and how to use it. Although, I like how a product can look like it does one thing, and when you interact with it, figure it out, it does the complete opposite. For example, Naoto Fukasawa’s design - the CD player that looks like a fan. This is probably the opposite of how we as designers used to design, we were once taught that we look at something, and we should know exactly what it is and how we should handle it.

It kind of looks like the clip of Fukasawa talking about the details of his phone design is juxtaposed against the rubbish collection dump, to emphasise what the woman is talking about, when commenting on how designers mostly are designing for the 10%percent of the world’s population who already own too much and 90 percent who don’t have basic products. That the design details on phones, cars, laptops and all these luxury products and whatnot are so detailed and unimportant when compared to the bigger picture, where people are in need of products for low costs.

I didn’t understand that wooden thing that is supposed to be some kind of interface to the internet which people stare into for 5 minutes, which releases information, from the exhibition, “Technological drams series no.1 Robots”. I have never thought about using this degree to design specifically for showing in exhibitions and galleries to convey an idea, that have no intention of working or being manufactured and I have realised I would like more to design for the 90 percent of people who do not have enough products that would improve their lives, instead of that whimsical stuff. But working for Mac would be cool too.