Objectified (2009, 75 minutes) is a documentary film about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?
It’s a great film (and free to watch from March 14-17!) but in particular, I love this quote from Dan Formosa, Design & Research, Smart Design, New York (around 6 minutes in)
But really our common interest is in understanding people and what their needs are. So if you start to think, well really, what these guys do as consultants is focus on people, then it’s easy to think about what’s needed design wise in the kitchen, or in the hospital, or in the car.
We have clients coming to us and saying here’s our average customer. For instance, she’s female, she’s 34 years old, she has 2.3 kids.
And we listen politely and say, well that’s great, but we don’t care about that person. What we really need to do to design is look at the extremes, the weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the strongest, or the fastest person. Because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.
View it online at www.ohyouprettythings.com/free
