As stated before, I have an issue with documentaries, due to their inability to examine situations with objectivity. This exploitation often takes two forms: the first is that the filmmaker seeks to exploit all of the dramatic moments in order to turn a rather boring situation into a dramatic, two-hour thriller. The second kind of exploitation is the opposite; taking all the good of a situation and never showing the bad, in order to excite or inspire or whatever other bullshit catch-words you might use at a convention.
Design & Thinking, a film by Mui-Ming Tsai, is guilty of the second exploitative technique. The light, bouncy music, shallow depth of field shooting in all, hi-key light filming pretty, happy people. It dances around from scene to scene (each scene presented with a Wes-Anderson-esque futura title card), showing how happy people are at their job, and how much they love design, and God-forbid we ever see these designers try to curse out that piece of plastic that just wont fit.
But this isn't a film review blog, it's a design blog. So now I'll talk about design.
The problem with these sorts of documentaries (besides the fact that they are poor pieces of cinema) is that they rarely show you much about the process itself. All monotony is stripped away, leaving us with just the exciting results. Now you may look at me like I'm stupid, and say "of course you cut out the boring parts-It's a movie." Then I would say you are apparently watching bad movies ('Breathless', 'There Will Be Blood', and 'Hunger' are all excellent films that use the boring parts to their advantage). However, this is simply not fair. To show the exciting parts of design, stripped of blood, sweat and tears is an insult to design and designers themselves.
Some might argue that the purpose of the film is to inspire us to look at design differently. Well, they've failed in that too: it seems they are echoes the same "Design is everywhere!" chant that every other design-based film is echoing as well. As for inspiration, it fails in that area too. Sure, I might get excited the the happy people, and the fun shapes and all the money, but when I actually set down to the nitty gritty, my inspiration high will quickly wear off, leaving me more sad than before.
Not to say that the movie was a complete bore. Talking with the guy who ran the cooking classes was very intriguing.
My biggest problem with the film was the tone. The tone that is so well summed up by a passing quote on a door of one of the design institute: "Every problem has a material solution." The whole tone of the film was that this was true, that design of material things could fix every problem. There is no idea that is more dangerous than this, and this is where I really show my cards as a Christian Mystic. This assumes that every problem is rooted in the material world. That we are no more than a collection of molecules interacting and processing via matter and energy. It assumes that our problems are not based in something far deeper that matter.
This is my problem with design today; we really believe we can fix everything, while we ignore the blatant issue that maybe, just maybe we are the problem.
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