YakShaving

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to see a private screening of Objectified at the Institute of Design by Director Gary Hustwit (director of Helvetica). The movie was spectacular. It had the same characteristic cinematography as Helvetica, and featured sweet tunes from El Ten. The movie featured Paola Antonelli (MOMA), Bangle (BMW), Moggridge/Brown/Kelley/Suri (IDEO), Fukusawa (prev. Muji), Dieter Rams (who cracks me up), and Karim Rashid (also cracks me up but is a joker).

Movie trailer:

The movie is awesome, it was totally worth skipping class (whoops) to get to see Gary and ask him questions in person about the documentary.

I was happy to hear that Gary had a similar version of the future of designed products that I subscribe to: 2 classes of products, one that fosters a recyclable/disposable mentality, and another that is truly authentic — ages well, and has connected personal stories. This second class of products intrigues me. It is the old leather briefcase with the shiny patina that your dad gives you, or the wallet you’ve used for years and just won’t give up even though you get a new one for your birthday. Interesting to explore the intersection of these two classes. Imagine if you had an outer laptop case of some sort of metal and leather that wore really well, and changed the guts of it when you wanted to upgrade? In all honesty, this is probably unlikely to happen in the near future since people really like having “shiny new gadgets”, but fun to imagine the possibility.

The most inspiring comments from Objectified came from Rob Walker, who I hadn’t heard of until I watched the movie though I am a relatively frequent NYT reader. His comments about shopping in your own closet made me feel even more strongly about moving to shared ownership models and “stuff” co-operatives… (but more on this later).

I have a lot more to say about Objectified, but I’ll integrate it into the next few posts that I have had on the backburner for a while.

p.s. I’ve decided I really want to make a documentary sometime. +Added to future bucketlist.

Obama, speaking at Georgetown:

One of the changes that I would like to see — and I’m going to be talking about in this in weeks to come — is seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things — engineers, scientists, innovators. For so long, we have placed at the top of our pinnacle folks who can manipulate numbers and engage in complex financial calculations. And — and that’s good. We need some of that. But you know what we can really use is some more scientists and some more engineers who are building and making things that we can export to other countries.

I’m hoping he didn’t literally mean tangible things; a great message nonetheless.