Edified by Objectified

When I was a kid, and I mean like when I was 8 or 9, if someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grow up—I'd confidently reply "an aerospace engineer." I wasn't really even sure what that was, but I'd heard that's who designs airplanes. What I really wanted to be was an industrial designer—my dream at that age was to design cars, jets, helicopters and vehicles in general.

This week, after wrapping up Mad Men Season 2, I managed to sneak Objectified into our Netflix queue at precisely the right moment. Objectified is documentarian Gary Hustwit's follow-up to his delightfully-designerly doc Helvetica and it features interviews with some of the world's foremost industrial designers.

Where Helvetica charms us with more of a history and philosophical debate on typeface itself, Objectified simply exposes the creative process of ID and analyzes where it's going. Even though it's missing just a smidgen of the humor and passion of its predecessor, I can't complain at all about listening to my heroes—such as Dieter Ram, Jonathan Ive and Chris Bangle—pontificate about where things are headed. Needless to say, I was creatively fed. In fact, one of the resounding takeaways of Objectified is that these guys are indeed futurists. Here's a couple quick quotes to whet your appetite.

"The value, and especially the legitimization of design will be, in the future, measured more in terms of how it can enable us to survive. I don't think this is an exaggeration..." - Dieter Ram

"Tomorrow will be different. The tools to make things, to find your world, will available to everybody... " - Chris Bangle

Funny side-note, right when Bangle said that, Mrs. Kyality was busy using her Cricut home plotter to create her own custom holiday gift tags.