Objectified is a must watched documentary about industrial design, about human's relationship with manufactured objects and the people who design them. Big names like Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ive, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Karim Rashid, and Paolo Antonelli are enough to made me want to watch it first time I heard about it, not to mention many others big inspiring names.
The movie opens with a narration about the goal of industrial design which has always been mass production. One of the earliest examples was the emperor of China at the time of war. One of his problem was that each of his own archers made their own arrows. So if one archer died, others couldn't grab the arrows from his quiver because it didn't fit his bow. So the emperor came up with the solution of mass producing the arrows so that each arrow would fit any bow.
There are too many important points from the movie that it would be pages long if I write all of them. Like when Jonathan Ive explains about the process of manufacturing a macbook, how they spent most of the time thinking about how to make the fixtures to make the design into realization. Or how people mostly don't realize that each object, even a very simple one like toothpick, was design with thoughts behind it. We often take everything around us for granted.
Would definitely have watch this again. Oh, and it was actually the second movie by Gary Hustwit, who also made Helvetica, the documentary about typography (obviously), graphic design and visual world. And also Urbanized, a documentary about the design of cities and the issues behind urban design and architecture. I so have to watch these two.
