“Good design is honest”
Even though “Objectified” focuses in Industrial design, it was interesting to see rules, concepts and models we studied in the course and that apply to design in general being mentioned many times by interviewees. Visibility was discussed many times through the film with sentences such as “Good design is honest”. Designers from the film logically didn’t mention visibility directly, but talked about it in many ways.
For most of them, a good product design has to show to users what they are suppose to do with it. The product or object has to be “honest” enough to put forward its main affordances in a visible way. And is not an easy task to do so. Another sentence that called my attention was that well-designed objects have to “feel almost undesigned”. The better the design, less explanation needed to make users understand its functionalities.
By watching the film, I remembered my childhood when we were suppose to help our parents to install any kind of new electric device in the house. TVs, CD players, washing machines, ovens, microwaves, fridges, whatever - it was always a pain to understand how it should work. Companies sent (and still do) huge manuals on how to install/use their products in its package. But why would a logical object (even a complex one) need 500 pages of manual? A well-designed one most likely would not.
“ When I started I found out that the most important thing for designers would be to go to the environment, look at people and think about how they experience products as a source of inspiration”
This sentence was fundamental for me to understand how any design needs to be tested with users to understand if it works or not. By paying attention to how people react to our product (being physical or digital), we can understand what is not working, where is it missing to give them a feedback, what kind of false affordances we are showing, etc.
Most importantly, at this moment I also made a connection between Human Computer Interaction and Crossmedia Production. As content producers, an important step of the production of our projects is to go out of the building and test it with our target audiences. How do they react to that specific scene? How funny it was that line? In both cases, having ideas in our heads is something great, but we should also test them in order to understand how right our assumptions were.
Different opinions, different paths for success
Another thing that called my attention in the film was the diverging opinions on how to create good design. For instance, I remember in one part of the film I guess it was Anthony Dune who said that “my job is about what is going to happen, not about what already happened”. Nevertheless, most of the other designers seemed to agree (and I also agree with them) that design is also about what already happened.
As we learned in the course, a designer being industrial, interaction, product or graphical designer, has to take into consideration users’ cultural background and knowledge when in the creative process. Of course, innovation is a key to success and we shouldn’t be afraid to try it out new concepts or new ways of dealing with a design, however, it is also necessary to think why things work this way and if there is a problem with it or not. Otherwise, it can happen that we start changing features that we shouldn’t touch when designing something that already exists.
Anthony Dune, on the other hand, is a famous and successful designer. He probably takes into consideration consumers’ cultural background when designing his products. But what he means is most likely tha innovation is very important in his work and what defines a good designer. In this sense, I also believe that it is the only way for us to move forward as a global society.
Some thoughts about Apple and design
We all agree that things have to be clear and understandable. Even nowadays the arbitrariness and thoughtlessness in which the things are so often brought to market is shocking. We read the 1988 book “The Design of Everyday things” by Donald A Norman, and were arguing if maybe the three decades with industrial production and ever-raising competition would have helped to fix this problem and a clean, user-friendly design would have became a must, but apparently, as the film argues, it is not yet the case. Why do we still have the chairs that are not comfortable to sit in? Why, instead of not using the GPS device with this totally user unfriendly interface, that would force the designers to make changes in the product itself, we are calling ourselves dumb instead? It is exactly the thing Norman was asking three decades ago, and this is the concern of good designers now.
“Good design is as little design as possible” - this sometimes interferes with the human factor of individual designers and companies. How to stand out? How to be innovative? How to be able to compete with others? Impress the investors and superior employees? This is where the film starts to talk about one company that has managed to stand out from day one. It’s Apple. The Apple designer guy explains how they got to be an industry-wide design example. They know how to use different attributes: material, form. They take into account how does the user connect to the product, what is the key interaction element. They have found out how to get the design “out of the way”. Unlike many many competitors out there, Apple products’ forms are not arbitrary shaped, but are there for a reason - this is where they start thinking about design. As the interviewee points out - design must be almost inevitable, the product should feel almost “undesigned”.
The feature or part in the product is there only if it does something, that is necessary for the functioning. As a user of the new MacBook pro - I, for example, adore how they even took the “MacBook Pro” sign off the front, leaving the whole thing totally plain simple. They took off all the indicators, lights, everything that is not critical for use - and I did not even notice anything lacking from my previous Probook. Look at Apple keyboards - so simple it’s almost undesigned. But it leaves us with the certainty - this is exactly how it should be. My mother is freaking out when it comes to technology, and when it came to the point she needed a smartphone.. though I am not an Apple evangelist - iPhone was the logical choice.. For the simple reason of it being so “fool-proof” and intuitive, thinking of the user need prior to designing anything. A physical button on the side to switch between silent and ringer modes; its state indicated by red colour, that is not even a digital indicator - wait.. is there even any other way to do it?
“Design is a search for form. usually the hardest part is to remove, remove, remove. Bit by bit, everything that is unnecessary. That gets in the way of the maximum unity.”
Almost all our relationship with the device soon after we start to use it is formed by the interaction between us and what’s happening behind the screen, experience between us and the software. It has so little to do with the physical design. And this is where Apple has been shooting in the target since the early days. Taking all the unnecessary stuff out, and leaving the emotional part to the interaction designers, that create the experience and ease of intuitive usage.
Using this right approach from the start - and you hit the goal. The other companies tried this and that, and what happens now? More and more business-class laptops, for example, look exactly like Apple products. I was looking at the billboard recently and thought, why Asus does not get sued for being designed almost exactly like MacBook Air.
In the film, there was a question raised on designing things, that stand the challenge of time. It is kind of against what the consumer society idea leads us doing, as it is beneficial for the capitalism that we have things and we change them as often as possible. Where is the balance of a sustainable design then? How did Apple manage to create a design that does not “get out of fashion”, but still motivate us to change a phone to a newer version every year?
The film kind of answers to that. We tend to want new things. “new now”, “next now” kind of look. Very well knowing, that this “next” is not going to be “forever” as well. So the biggest task is to design each new thing in a way the previous one looks like “then”. And this is what Apple is doing pretty well without making the “then” things look miserable.
At the same time, we barely ever see Apple’s products piling up in the garbage. Why? Because they do not use lack of quality to motivate people buy newer and more powerful versions of the gadgets. They have discovered the magic of motivating the people with this “feeling” they need the freshest models, at the same time letting the old ones continue living their lives. In the hands of other people with less budgets, in the houses of parents and grandparents.. After all - it still works for maximum possible time.
Objectified is an amazing movie. Part of a trilogy on design that began with Helvetica using typography as a door to discuss graphic design and ends with Urbanized using cities as a view to urban planning and achitecture, Objectified sits in the middle, using our fetish for beautiful artifacts as a window into usability and industrial design.
Different cultures have different relations to the objects around them. Germans are pragmatic animals, obsessed with function, the French have an uncontrollable need for beauty, to the point of being kitsch, the Japanese are ritualistic beings with a very tactile relationship to objects etc. This reflects in the different approaches to design you see in the movie from designers such as Naoto Fukasawa, the Bouroullec brothers or Dieter Rams.
Speaking of Rams, the movie reflects his status as the father of good design by being filled to the brim with quotes from his ten principles. Those bear mentioning - good design is innovative, makes a product useful, makes a product understandable, is aesthetic, is unobtrusive, is honest, is long-lasting, is thorough (down to the last detail), is environmentally friendly and, last but definitely not least, good design is as little design as possible.
Rams' influence on Jonny Ive is left very evident and Ive is shown as his heir apparent, disciple and magnum opus. Ive's iron-grip on Apple's industrial design, reflective of Steve Job's iron-grip on Apple itself, gets special attention in the movie. Other new-school designers get equal attention: Karim Rashid with his flowing, almost liquid forms and his products that reach from the cheapest trash cans to the borderline objets-d'art, Marc Nelson's fluidic shapes that span from chairs and appliances to automobiles and airplanes and Chris Bangle, the American who took over BMW's design in the 90's (including MINI and Rolls Royce) after stints at Opel and Fiat.
Rams is not the only grand master featured in the movie. The super-studio IDEO (born in the 90's as the merger of Bill Moggridge's Moggridge Associates and ID Two and professor David Kelley's David Kelley Design) is shown as the superpower of American industrial design (even though Moggridge was actually born in the UK). IDEO is responsible for the first laptop, for Apple's first mouse, for Palm's PDAs and several non-electronic gadgets as well (its clients include PepsiCo, Ford and Procter & Gamble, among many others).
Although the movie makes a deep dive into the mind of the industrial designer as a professional and as an individual (showing the 'disease' that some of us feel, as very well exemplified by Jonny Ive, of obsessively overanalyzing other people's design choices and trying to guess at who their target audience was), it lacks something that both Urbanized and Helvetica have: conflict. While Helvetica uses the balance between modernism and postmodernism to lecture the spectator on good design and Urbanized pitches planned and organic urbanism against each other, Objectified misses the opportunity to pitch Rams' ten principles (especially being honest, environmentally friendly and long lasting) to the pressing forces of marketing to build in planned obsolescence and the constant push for consumerism. While it touches these points, eventually, it avoids making this a central point in the discussion.
This defect aside, Objectified is probably the greatest documentary on industrial design, especially from a designer's point of view, as it reminds us that every object, every tool around us has been designed by someone, for someone, to fill a certain need and complete a certain task, even if it was poorly so. It is a great service to the design community and it manages to be very entertaining while doing so.
