Vedio Reflection- The Objectified

I’ve learnt a lot of stuff for my future design career after watching the film the Objectified. This is a good documentary film that covered such a huge and complex topic, and it is a useful introduction of industrial design for people like me who just started learning this.




One good concept the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design for Apple, Jonathan Ive made is that a big definition of who you are is a designer is the way you look the world. Designers often try to draw too much attention to a feature simply to force the user to look at their clever design contribution, instead, a good design is able to demonstrate its function by itself, and some functions should only be there when it’s performing, like the indicator light on Macbook pro.



When we design a product, we have to look into the attribute of the product, some may be the material, the form connecting to people and how you physically connect to your product. There are three phases of a modern design, one of the phases is looking at a design in a formal relationship, formal logic of the product. The second way to look at it is the symbolism and the content of what you are dealing with. The third phase is to look at design in a contexture scenes and a much bigger picture. It’s looking at the ecological context for that object and human-object relationship. And design is search for form, what form should an object take.



As David Kelly said, bad design is where the customer thinks it’s their fault that something doesn’t work…People should demand more from the things they own. They need to demand that things work. Oppositely, a good design is innovative and should make a product useful, it should be a aesthetic design and will make a product understandable, it should be honest, unobtrusive, and long-lived, it is consistent in every detail and it is environmentally friendly. Also, it should be as little design as possible.



I would like to end with a quote of Marc Newson’s words in the film, “I wish people would be more critical of design, and of designers, who are responsible for designing some pretty nasty stuff.”