Emila says the chair would be crafted from hard plastic, and have four telescopic legs made of titanium. Too bad I probably wouldn't be able to afford one. [Renamed via BornRich]

The clip is pretty interesting, even if you're not normally enamored with Apple. Ive is the most prominent tech designer of the last two decades, and I like his philosophy on "getting design out of the way." Hopefully the clip motivates you guys to go see the full movie, which is great, even if it doesn't reach the heights of Hustwit's previous effort Helvetica.

The concept's designer, Reindy Allendra, imagines the aircraft being constructed from material similar to the giant Airbus A380's GLARE composite: Glass-Reinforced Fiber Metal Laminate made of thin layers of metal and glass fiber.

The WB-1010 would supplement its fuel use with the ability to harvest wind energy into electricity. An extractable robotic stand would also be used during the craft's vertical landings.

Totally pie in the sky stuff, but very cool. Zoom in on the pic above for specifics. I wonder if United will actually have in-flight Wi-Fi on more than 13 planes 85 years from now? [Reindy Allendra via Yanko Design]

Simply put, the Teflon-coated back just feels and looks a lot better than the iPhone's—now crappy looking, I admit—plastic back. The Hero's polytetrafluoroethylene—the technical name for DuPont's Teflon—coating feels perfect in your hand. It doesn't appear to get any skin oil at all. No greasy fingerprints, just a perfect matte finish no matter how much I touched it.

It feels and looks like a white thermal tile out of NASA's shuttle.

The iPhone's plastic finish, on the other side, is a fingerprint magnet that looks as cheap as any Chinese knockoff after holding it for a few seconds. The Hero wins hands down on appearance, even while its front is too complicated for my taste. For a company like Apple—which takes such pride in their design and manufacturing—this is bad. For a consumer like me, this sucks.

"They are getting so boring"

Once upon a time Apple used to be innovators in the use of new materials. Those were the times in which they experimented with the iMacs and PowerMacs, which finished with the arrival of aluminum. Today, apart from the unibody manufacturing—which is just a form of aluminum manufacturing, a material that has been used forever in consumer products—their use of groundbreaking materials has stagnated.

I'm not the only one saying this. About a month ago Matt Buchanan and I asked the top executive of one of the most important industrial design firms in the world about his thoughts on Apple's design. After seing Objectified—and watching a legend like Dieter Rams glorifying Apple as the only consumer electronics company that counts when it comes to industrial design—I was expecting an ode to Jon Ive and his team. Instead, he replied:

They are great, but we [him and his colleagues in the industrial design world] think they are getting so boring. I mean, don't get me wrong, they got the use of aluminum perfected now... but what happened with the excitement that they used to generate with new materials? We all expect a lot more from Apple.

He is right. Their use of plastics in the iMac spread to every single consumer appliance out there. And Kara Johnson, materials expert from IDEO believes it'll be going out of style any day now (Maybe yesterday.) But now, even aluminum is the new beige. (Even if some experts believe there are few alternatives, there are a few.)

So yes, Apple should use new materials. Not for the sake of it, of course. They should use whatever materials fit the product technical needs. And for me, one of these needs as a consumer is that the product should look great at all times, and not just look great in the box or behind a store glass.

The need for new materials

The iPhone has this problem. It looks like crap with little use. They have tried to fix part of it with the oleophobic coating on the front glass—something that the HTC Hero also has—but the overall effect keeps being the same: Its back still looks cheap after some time.

One thing to note

For this reason we were all hoping for a matte back in the iPhone 3GS, but apparently Apple decided not to release it for one reason or the other.

I don't know and I don't care. What I do care about is that, after playing with the Hero, my iPhone now feels like cheap crap. And I don't even like Android.

Related reading: What Beautiful Gadgets Will Be Made Of

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

The kitchen, shaped like an egg, has enough space for a water reservation tank, a gas chamber (for storing cooking gas), a water sink and a burner. Bring it with you on camping trips and you can have fancy home-cooked meals in your tent.

Looking at the pictures, you're supposed to be able to strap it to the top of your car... though I'm not sure how that's supposed to work. Trying to strap anything that round to a flat surface seems like it'd be a pain in the ass. [Tuvie]

Since we only care about Apple products here at Gizmodo, I see a Mac Pro, a number of iPods, MacBook Pro, a clickwheel, iPhone, iPhone SIM ejector tool (!!) and an original iMac...

Oh we kid. There's some fine Dieter Rams Braun action in here, just about every important chair from the last century or so, a Wii, Kanye's favorite glasses, a Swatch...so much goodness. As an aviation junkie though, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit I can't place that profile of a flying-wing-type glider. Anyone know what that is?

Update: The guys who designed the poster, Build, are playing a similar game of "identify the iconic design" over on their blog, and they've provided a great high-res JPG of the poster to help make the game more fun. They also point out, as many of you have, that the word "Objectified" is hidden in the sixth row, and everything in the last row was used to make the film itself. Awesome.

You can grab one for $20 here: [Objectified]

We're lucky enough to be the first folks anywhere to bring you the trailer for Objectified, and I'm excited. Helvetica, is one of my all-time favorite documentaries because it distilled a daunting stack of design theory books into a film that was not only beautiful and entertaining but seriously informative—you didn't have to be a Swiss RISD student to appreciate it, even though there was enough back and forth about modernist and post modern graphic design theory to fill a seminar or two.

And by the looks of the trailer here, Objectified seems poised to do the exact same thing for industrial design, and we'll be learning from the best: That is, of course, Apple's Jonathan Ive telling us about the psychology of our gadget purchases in the first voiceover. We also see several heavies from IDEO, the major design firm responsible for the first laptop and Apple's first mouse, among other things, as well as Naoto Fukasawa, whose credits include the Infobar phones for KDDI/au (that you may have seen at Gizmodo Gallery) as well as his awesome wall-mounted CD player for MUJI. Present too are Dan Formosa & Davin Stowell from Smart, designers of the Flip cameras, and Dieter Rams, a legendary designer from Braun who was one of Ive in particular's biggest influences.

Objectified should be premiering this Spring. Watch for more info on the official site, and if you missed Helvetica, it's getting its US TV premiere on PBS tomorrow night (check your local station's times here) in a slightly abbreviated hour-long version. [Objectified]

But I can't help but chuckle over this video, where you have Moto's top designers proudly displaying their creations and then you try to send a text message on a phone like the RAZR or KRZR and you wind up wanting to chuck it out the window 'cause of its crap interface. Like I said, the design is excellent, but if they could get both sides in sync (design and software), then I'd be happy. – Louis Ramirez

The Shape of Phones [The Futures Channel via Core77]

Singaporean industrial designer Jaren Goh's mocked up an extremely stylish concept for a Sony Ericsson cameraphone he's calling Black Diamond. The polycarbonate mirror finish skin, metal detailing and form factor are all rather sleek, but the coolest feature has got to be the OLED borderless screen. Very sexy!

Jaren Goh Design
Sony Ericsson Black Diamond [Esato] (Thanks, Wandel!)