I just saw Objectified this weekend, and highly recommend it. It’s a great hour and 20 minutes with some of the best design minds on the planet, including superstars like Dieter Rams from Braun and Jonathan Ive from everything Apple. It’s wonderfully put together as the second part of a design trilogy from Gary Hustwit (the first was the also-excellent Helvetica).

Hearing Jonathan Ive describe the importance of Apple’s single-piece aluminum cutting process really made it hit home why they made such a big deal of it a couple years back. Seeing him describe how they get two keyboard frames from the inside of each 27″ iMac display cutout was pretty surprising as well. This is a part of design that I don’t think about much – the raw materials and how much they affect the process.

The part I identified with more was hearing one of the co-founders of IDEO describe how he created the first laptop. Great thinking went into all the design elements of the hardware, including a scoop that automatically ejected a pencil or any other object that fell into the hinge area accidentally – a wonderful detail. But hearing him describe how when he first started the thing up, the whole set of hardware fell away, and he realized that the real design would be in the software was fascinating. He invented interaction design at that point, he said. I found the parallels between his description of that moment and Jonathan Ive’s description of the iPhone very interesting. Ive may as well have been describing the iPad when he discussed how the minimalism of the design essentially causes the design to fall away entirely. It’s a fascinating world to live in when one realizes that the machine can be practically anything, and even the hardware designers are working with all their might to create a blank canvas. The possibilities of using a blank canvas for education are both imposing and unendingly thrilling.