Designing for the Future

Objectified explores the complex relationship between people and their objects. The full-length documentary film looks to designers to explain the impact that objects have on consumers’ lives, and what design can say about a person.

Gary Hustwit, the producer and director of Objectified, forms an argument about toady’s design culture by interviewing designers and studying their process. By looking closely at how designers all over the world are solving design problems, the viewer gets an in-depth look into the thought process of designers working now.

Through the course of the film process, personal identity through objects, consumerism, and sustainability are explored. Each topic is looked at as a problem that can be fixed and solved through design. The film shows the viewer that designers have the important job of looking into the future and anticipating what the buyer will want.

Today we live in a culture that is faced with the unique problem between the desire for new things, and the need to be sustainable. Designers more than anyone are facing the future, and realizing that it is there job to curb the consumerists need for the new and the now. What does this mean for designers? It means that when making new products designers must ask themselves what people value and how to make things that get better with time. Objectified explores and makes obvious and important question that all designers need to be asking themselves today, how do we design to better the future?


Image: Objectified, Title made of objects, taken from one of the posters designed for the film.