Gary Hustwit is best known (to me, anyway) as the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary about Wilco, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, and his film about synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, simply called Moog. He also got my attention by managing to make a very interesting film about, of all things, a font. That was Helvetica, and it was the first in Hustwit’s planned trilogy about design. Now he has returned with the second entry in his trilogy, Objectified. The new film will premiere November 24 on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series. Check your local listings for time and channel in your area.

Most people don’t think much about design. We touch and use hundreds of items in a day without giving a second thought about who made them, or why they look and feel as they do. Fortunately, there are people who give a lot of thought to design, and those people are the subjects of Hustwit’s film. Through in-depth conversations with people like Paola Antonelli, the design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Chris Bangle of the BMW Group in Munich, Bill Moggridge co-founder IDEO (who designed what may have been the first laptop computer, which he demonstrates), and Jonathan Ive at Apple, Hustwit gets to the heart of creative design and thinking. (more…)