And that's exactly the point. Like Helvetica, director Gary Hustwit's previous documentary triumph about the most prevalent typeface on earth, Objectified sings the praises of those very people who, while not necessarily under-appreciated, definitely operate in the background—they design your stuff. It's a secret little world, and through Objectified, we get to live in it.

Take this lamp I bought at a flea market last weekend. I Googled the only thing on the bottom that would identify it ("WINDSOR L-10") and got zero relevant results. It's old, pre-internet for sure, so I wasn't surprised. But who designed it? It's so tiny and Wall-e like (essentially a hybrid of Wall-e himself and the task lamp Pixar uses in their logo)—I want to know more! Someone designed this, and I love imagining the moment of its conception.

My lamp only cost $15, so odds are it wasn't designed by any of the überheavyweights featured in Objectified: There's Apple's Jonathan Ive, Smart Design (of Flip Video fame) founders Davin Stowell and Dan Formosa, the legendary Dieter Rams of Braun, the folks at IDEO (who designed the first laptop, among many other things), Naoto Fukusawa (father of the Infobar), Chris Bangle, the infamous (and former) chief designer of BMW, and many others. It's a star-studded group. Also featured prominently is Rob Walker, who writes my favorite New York Times column "Consumed" in the magazine every Sunday—he is a joy in every scene he is in, including where he dreams of an ad campaign encouraging people to got out and use and be satisfied with the stuff they already own.

But what's great (and where Helvetica also ruled) is that Hustwit is a master interviewer. He gets his subjects to speak about what can be a jargon and marketing-voodoo laden industry with total clarity and comfort that folks that didn't go to design school can comprehend freely. Ive, holding up the single aluminum block from which a unibody MacBook is hewn while trying to control his massive biceps, speaks about how designers are ultimately obsessive, borderline neurotic people. He can't look at an object anywhere without seeing the multiple layers of intent involved-who designed it, who it's designed for, what it does well. To Ive, it's an illness.

To others, it's desire. Marc Newson, who designs everything but is famous especially for aviation-related like the EADS spaceplane, puts it this way: "I want to have things that don't exist yet," which I think we can all relate to here.

One place where Objectified gets somewhat tripped up is in its hesitance to boldly define the inherent conflict of the designer, especially now: good design should last and improve with time, which is often directly opposed to the interests of a commercial designer's clients who want people to keep buying things. This theme does come up in the film, but where Helvetica had the postmodernism vs. modernism conflict-in-a-bubble at its heart, which served as the perfect organizational structure to not only be entertaining, but to also school everyone in design theory, Objectified lacks a similar conflict by which everything can be defined.

I was disappointed to not see more of the good design vs. capitalism conflict mainly because it's going to be the most important concept in gadget design over the next few decades—not only for the environmental concerns, but because software is more than ever the representation of a gadget's heart and soul. This is not a new concept: when fondling the Grid Compass (the world's first laptop computer he helped design), Bill Moggridge of IDEO says it only took a few seconds for the user experience to be completely about the software interface on its 320x200 screen, with the hardware dropping away almost completely. And he designed it! As an interesting contrast, Naoto Fukasawa explains that in Japan, interactions with a tangible object are much more important, culturally, to the Japanese. Which makes sense when you see the horrid software being run by such a beautiful phone as the Infobar.

This concept also fits snugly in with a designer's environmental concerns—since software doesn't fill up a landfill, having hardware that can be re-upped to latest and greatest status over the web makes the earth happy too.

This choice to not hang the whole film on this idea was of course a conscious one, and it probably ensured a broader, more appealing film in the end. I just missed the elegance of everything fitting together into nice ideological halves in Helvetica.

But when judged alone, Objectified gets the job done beautifully and does for industrial designers what Helvetica did for graphic designers: lets us step into their frame of reference and greater appreciate, or at the very least notice, their omnipresent work.

Trailer:

More info: objectifiedfilm.com

I asked several designers what they thought, but Kara Johnson, the lead of the Materials Team at design company IDEO, had the final word based on her focused expertise related to the question at hand. Her answer is a bit heady, but I won't get in the way of what she's telling us about tomorrow's gadget materials.

"Plastic as we know it is kind of on the way out, especially when it’s painted. No one likes the way your phone’s paint chips at the corners after a few months of use. Unpainted plastic is the future. And we need to move beyond injection molding, look at sheet processes to build structure from a series of 2d layers, instead of molding a complete 3d structure.

Glass, as a part of the screen, won’t go away very quickly. But maybe we’ll find ways to use glass so that it’s more difficult to create cracks with an accidental drop on the kitchen floor. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from automotive glass windshields or scratch resistant coatings on eyewear. And why not etch the glass?

Metal will continue to be a player in the world of gadgets. It’s beautiful and appropriate to create thin, mobile, technology-based products. Extruded aluminum is a design opportunity that has not yet been fully explored in terms of form or function. With the introduction of laser etching or chemical etching or a detailed craft process like wire filigree, we should be exploring the use of pattern on metal or to create surfaces. This is more evident in large-scale products or architecture where metal is used to create elegant structures or to create a frame for other elements of pattern. By translating innovations in metal from a large scale to something small, we will find new design opportunities, too.

So what’s next?

I think we need to experiment with how we design the buttons that connect hardware and software experiences. This is a design element whose materiality has been relatively unchanged, and there is more opportunity here to create ceramic or wood details (where the drop test requirements can be quietly avoided)...What if the power button was made of stone? What if the LEDs shine thru a thin layer of bamboo? We also need to experiment with the screen itself, this element has been limited to the display of information. What if the screen folds or unfolds? What if the glass is textured or etched with communication icons or pattern? Finally, in the future, I think that we should experiment with creating decoration or function by introducing incredibly surprising technologies (high-tech or low-tech) – like ferrofluid or starch-based plastics.

If the next generation of gadgets is about experimenting with materials or materiality, then it will only be not about what materials we use but how we use materials to tell stories.

What does vinyl mean to music and media players? Can phone be made of fabric so it is ready-to-wear, like the clothes you keep in your closet? What does traditional craft mean to high-tech products? What is the physical connection between these objects of fetish and the internet buzz that proceeds/follows each product launch? How do we create real and tangible advertising for the next CE products? And look for the introduction of “new” materials in the small details of each product…the platform of these devices is relatively standardized by its components, phones and laptops are a commodity. The design is in the details and the story you tell."

—Kara Johnson, lead of the Materials Team at IDEO, is the co-author of Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design and the forthcoming book, I Miss My Pencil

Even Jon Kaplan, the IDEO veteran behind the effort, had moments of doubt. But more than that, he had moments of disbelief: How could someone actually come up with that!? How could someone actually engineer a pole-dancing doll to spin around in silver garland, knock down a Phillippe Starck juicer, trigger a Gaussian gun, and topple a Tickle-Me Elmo, plastic eyes first, onto a computer mouse that then prints a document in Shanghai? All told, there were about ten other machine-based vignettes that lasted almost 20 minutes and spanned day and night, thanks to the fifteen-hour time difference between offices.

[IDEO Labs]

Designed by former product designer for IDEO Takeshi Ishiguro, there are two designs he did for Artecnica. One is this mini streetlamp, and another is a Victorian lamp illuminated with a small 5-watt incandescent bulb. Check out the gallery for photos of each one in their closed-book form and fully open. Each one available now for pre-order for $86. – Charlie White

Book of lights by takeshi ishiguro for artecnica [Unica Home, via MocoLoco]

Imagine grabbing it quickly - from inside your bag, from off a shelf, from under a car seat - and freely interacting with it without needing to turn it over or align it right side up?

CUin5 [Movie Page]
non.object [Book Page]