Since seeing Gary Hustwit's new doc Objectified at sxsw, I can't stop thinking about toothpicks. In his followup to Helvetica, Hustwit chats with any number of designers of yummy fetish-object products--a roll call that includes usual-suspect names like Muji, Apple, Ikea, Target, Oxo--about the taken-for-granted objects that inform our everyday existence.
Form follows function here. The cinematography--the framing alone--is shiny as all get out. Sleek machines smoothly extrude products. And you've never seen so many gorgeous closeups of hands [or, er, hangnails] holding toothbrushes and potato peelers. Let's hear it for the [golden] age of mechanical reproduction!
Although the font designers in Helvetica seemed, on the whole, a slightly livelier [or less familiar] bunch, designer Karim Rashad is self-awarely rad and ridiculous here, sporting a manicure that just won't quit. Parisian brothers Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec [or, as I wrote in my notebook, "Dead Ringers designers"] are given to pronouncements like "He is the fox, and I am the porcupine" to describe their working relationship. And, naturally, there are earnest Germans and folks from the Netherlands. What's not to love?
Avid Apartment Therapy visitors and ReadyMade/Dwell readers especially will thrill to Hustwit's latest outing. Hell, it's a niche the cinetrix has been known to occupy at times. Indeed, I will happily admit to patronizing places like this and being fascinated that students at my university can major in package design. [Start thinking about packaging and you won't soon stop. It's like noticing helvetica everywhere.]
Objectified sent me out into the world thinking about a couple of things. First, the excellent Josh Glenn-edited collection Taking Things Seriously, which takes a similar approach to elevating the seemingly ordinary object. [Turns out the Objectified site has a section called Objectify Me in which "people we like discuss objects that inspire them" that runs along much the same lines.] Second, how every last person in Austin for sxsw seemed incapable of turning off their iPhones. I understand the primal allure of the Apple aesthetic as much as the next pulse-haver, but seriously, I was praying for a puckish Russian hacker to disable the lot of them before the fest was over.
But more than a week on, it's the clever design of the simple Japanese toothpick that blew my mind and stays with me still. Look at how the newel post grooves on the not-pointy end allow the user to snap it off to serve as a wee toothpick rest. That shit is bananas.
