Film

There’s an exquisite tension built into the practice of industrial design: Designers want to make objects that you’ll want to pass down through generations, but design as a field thrives due only to the disposability of the products. As designer Tim Brown notes in this engaging doc, “most of what you design ends up in a landfill.” So for all the lofty talk—and there’s a fair bit of it here—about “democratic design” and objects speaking to us about ourselves, design is really about making us want new things.

Hustwit, who made a huge splash with his typeface doc Helvetica, goes to exactly the places you would expect: Apple, Target, IKEA, a few car designers, and well-known design firms like IDEO and Smart Design. The fact that they are well known already explains why this isn’t as much of a revelation as Helvetica; while font design is a pretty obscure specialty, industrial design has been a hot topic in the culture at large.

Still, Hustwit gets some great stuff from people who wear hipper glasses than you, designers like Karim Rashid and Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec. A little critical distance is offered by New York Times columnist Rob Walker, who boldly sings the praises of “the things you already own that you like.” That’s a design for living.