SXSW: Objectified Teaches Us ‘You Are What You Own’
The hurricane is coming. You have 20 minutes to grab the objects in your house that are most important to you. What do you reach for first?
That’s a question asked by Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for The New York Times (NYT), at the very end of Objectified, director Gary Hustwit’s brilliant documentary about industrial design. The film, which premiered here at South by Southwest to a packed house Saturday, is an examination of the objects that surround us — the gadgets, furniture, cars, appliances and everyday things that we collect, consume and, ultimately, throw away.
You may not ever think about what kind of planning goes into designing simple, everyday things like toothbrushes, wastebaskets or hedge trimmers, but after seeing this movie, you will never look at any one of those objects the same way again.
Consider the lowly vegetable peeler — in the film, we hear a story of the designer’s wife who was complaining that the handle of her metal potato skinner was hurting her hands as she struggled to grip it tightly. He saw this as a golden opportunity to redesign the kitchen tool, and he set about designing dozens of handles of different sizes using different materials. In the end, a bicycle handlebar grip provided a flash of brilliance — he slid the rubber grip onto the peeler’s metal frame and he had his new, ergonomic design.
