Our lives are surrounded by small and seemingly insignificant objects that, if we stop and think about them for a moment, were created by designers. Golf balls, barrettes, toothbrushes: They are not simply manufacturing accidents but very specific responses to our needs and wants and the designers’ aesthetic goals. The “Objectify Me” section of the website for the design documentary Objectified invites designers and design-watchers to muse on these small wonders with wonderful results. The golf ball prompts Craig Foltz to ask a series of whimsical questions. Debbie Millman recalls a juvenile obsession with barrettes that led to misdemeanor theft. And Alice Twemlow turns her gaze to the badminton shuttlecock, which
seems to me to contain all the time and space of a long summer’s afternoon on a large green lawn. In its delicately ribbed frame are encapsulated pitchers of lemonade, the drone of bees, the smell of mown grass and the sun-baked mustiness of the garden sheds where shuttlecocks rest along with broken croquet mallets, dog-chewed Frisbees and trapped flies.
Source: Objectified
Image by barkertrax, licensed under Creative Commons.