objectified

22Nov09

The film Objectified exhibits different designers and their opinions and contributions to contemporary design. For example, Billy Moggridge is mentioned for his involvement with interaction design, and Naoto Fukasawa is discussed for his role as an industrial designer in Japan. One designer in particular, Karim Rashid, discusses the development of the digital camera and the evolution of its form.

Rashid is mostly known for his use of organic shapes in the objects he creates, but his insight on the history of the digital camera is useful for designers to know. The camera archetype was directly derived from cameras that had previously contained film. In the past, film would be inserted into the back of the camera, and would need to be pulled and wound in order for pictures to be taken. This contributed to the horizontal orientation of the digital camera, while the height is structured to fit a roll of film. The current technology of our society has no use for film, which means that there is no need for digital cameras to take on the identical form of older cameras. This means that cameras should be able to come in any shape that the designer chooses, but the patterns of previous times continues to influence designs today. Perhaps, in the future, the digital camera will take on a completely different form, once more people realize that the constraints associated with film are no longer present.