How Form and Content Interact in Objectified

Objectified is a 75-minute documentary film by Gary Hustwit in 2009. The documentary explains how form and content interact together within design. It emphasizes how the object’s function and design to complete that goal is important to the object. In fact, the aesthetics of an object comes almost near to last sometimes.

In fact, the only company that has ever satisfied all points of design is the Apple Company, according to the documentary. Their modern innovations are functional and aesthetically pleasing.

The film displays how designers try to answer the BIG questions of design such as what is design, who are the people of design and especially what is the role of design in our society? They showed interviews asking designers to explain their process to creating a product that is functional, easy to use and aesthetically pleasing. In order, for a design to be successful function has to be above form. If the design just looks good but fails to convey its function then the product has failed to achieve success.

Designers MUST obsess over the goal to fit people’s needs and desires. They must improve the product or create something FOR the consumer.

The film follows the three phases of modern design, which demonstrates the relationship between form and content.

First, the formal relationship or formal logic that gives form to a traditionally accepted object. Form should easily show the object’s function.

Second is the symbolism of the content is which the form is influenced by society and culture. Third is the design-contextualized sense of technology that seeks to satisfy the relationship between human and object. This last step seeks to find a way in which the designers must seek to answer the big questions such as a away to make the product easily recyclable.

Objectified demonstrates how form and content should always work together to create an easily accessible product. To quote a line from the documentary, “Good design is aesthetic, innovative, honest, unobtrusive, consistent, long-lived, useful, in detail, environmentally friendly, and have as little design as possible.”