Gary Hustwit, the director known for his documentary film on the Swiss typeface, Helvetica, has just released a first glimpse of his latest work. He’s spent considerable time interviewing product design’s heads of state and put together Objectified.

I’m especially inspired because in just 90 seconds of preview, there were a few familiar faces. David Kelley, a co-founder of IDEO, is an alumnus from my graduate program and is a major part of the Stanford Design program and d.school. We have had the pleasure of visiting his incredible home, which was designed by Ettore Sottsass, and saw the garage, which houses part of his collection of fantastic vehicles. Bill Moggridge is another co-founder of IDEO and is lauded as a founder of interaction design. He’s the author of a book on the subject and we’ve had the honor of his company over beers in the courtyard in front of our workspace. I can’t wait to see this film.

Bruce Nussbaum’s recent blog post, attacks “Innovation” and welcomes “Transformation.” I think the key phrase in there is how the future of Design “relies on humanizing technology, not imposing technology on humans.”

Contemporary auctions for design objects have been fetching prices that rival great artworks. These pieces are typically sitting on the same auction block. Where can one draw the line between a utilitarian design object and an artistic expression? Probably in the production quantity. Limited edition pieces by sought-after designers have the singularity of fine art, although the purpose of limited edition design objects can typically be attributed to bumping up a price tag.

There’s a good synopsis of five design-as-art movements at ARTINFO. They touch upon The Wiener Werkstätte, The Bauhaus, American Studio, Memphis, and Functional Art.

Some representative pieces:

Josef Hoffman, of the The Wiener Werkstätte



Marianne Brandt, of the Bauhaus



George Nakashima, of the American Studio



Ettore Sottsass, of Memphis (an Italian movement)



Tom Dixon, of Functional Art

The Premier Padmini

The statue of Louis Agassiz, fallen from the Zoology building at Stanford after the earthquake in 1906. Someone was quoted in the papers as saying Louis Agassiz “was great in the abstract, but not in the concrete.”

The latest Wes Anderson commercial, this time for Japan’s SoftBank Mobile, involves a Mr. Brad Pitt in a yellow pith helmet fussing about during a particularly dense bit of action, strongly reminiscent of Jacques Tati’s 1953 Les Vacances de Monseieur Hulot. The song is Poupée de cire, poupée de son by France Gall.

Perpenduum regulars will note the use of the Citroën 2CV.

Just got wind of a new plug-in for iTunes called TuneUp. They just released the Mac software a couple days ago (PC version had already been up.) It’s supposed to do all the music library housekeeping for you. That includes cleaning mislabeled music (artist names, genres, track numbers, genres, etc.), finding missing cover art. It can also alert you of concert dates and pull in YouTube videos and news. It’s refreshing to see a new product with a clean-looking website too!

The SFMOMA is running an exhibit of Martin Puryear’s sculptures. With tremendous thanks to Chris and Kate, who got me a museum membership, I’ve visited the exhibit twice already. I really liked every single piece without exception, but I think my favorite was Old Mole (1985) shown above.