Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our relationship with manufactured objects. For the marketer, it is a look behind the curtain at the business of creating what we sell (objects, more often than not) much earlier in the process than we are often privy to.

Director Gary Hustwit’s (Helvetica) film offers us a look at the creativity and discipline, as well as the decisions and constraints, that must guide the form and function of everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. Hustwit’s bias is definitely toward uncovering designers’ personal philosophies, but the resulting film also reveals the demands that consumerism, social identities, and now sustainability, place on the shaping of all things manufactured – and ultimately bought.

More than anything, Objectified serves as a primer on the subject. Great for the student, the curious culture observer, or a communication nerd because it scratches at the topic of industrial design with just enough depth to be engaging and informative, without becoming too concerned with the plumbing.

The film’s perspective on how digital interaction and the microchip has the power to change the form of products – but how it doesn’t appear to be doing so yet (digital cameras still look like film cameras, for example, despite the absence a film chamber that dictated its predecessor’s form) – starts to uncover how arbitrary consumer expectations influence the design process.

Among the film’s highlights is hearing Chris Bangle (former Chief of Design at BMW) talk about the automobile as ‘personal avatar’, and IDEO founder Bill Moggridge recounting the moment when, upon designing the first laptop, he realized software would define our world more so than hardware.

On the topic of bad design, David Kelley, also of IDEO, says:

“Bad design is where the customer thinks it’s their fault that something doesn’t work. So if you can’t make your GPS device work in your car — I mean, there should be a riot because they’re so poorly designed! Instead, the user thinks, ‘Oh, I’m not very smart, I can’t make this GPS thing work.’ People should demand more from the things they own, they need to demand that things work.”

The film does get a bit thin in places where the designers are given reign to wax philosophical on their craft. I’d have gladly traded some of that for more time with legendary Braun designer Dieter Rams, who is given conspicuously short shrift when one considers the weight and span of his influence in contemporary design circles. A lesser peeve is that though iconoclast Karim Rashid’s suggestion of cardboard laptops and sugar cane mobile phones is well articulated, the man’s sartorial resemblance to Brüno undermines his argument.

I came away believing (more than ever) that that the average consumer is irrelevant. It’s the edges of an intended audience that truly set the parameters for effective design. I think there’s a lot to be learned from that belief in how we choose to communicate with our respective audiences as marketers and advertisers.