Hot on the heels of Helvetica the movie, comes a new feature length documentary from Gary Hustwit entitled: Objectified – a film about industrial design. It explores everything from the toothbrush to the latest tech gadgets and generally “cool” objects. The film investigates our relationship with form & function and those that are constantly trying to reinvent the way that we use things to make them better. The film features a bevy of  the world’s leading designers, including Jonathan Ive: Senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, who you can blame for such objects as the iMac, iPod and my favourite: the iPhone.

The film is due for release in the early half of 2009, but in the meantime, check out this trailer. You can find out more about the film here: www.objectifiedfilm.com

‘Media artist Toshio Iwai and Yamaha have collaborated to design a new digital musical instrument for the 21st century, TENORI-ON. A 16×16 matrix of LED switches allows everyone to play music intuitively, creating a “visible music” interface.’

Anyway, it’s expensive, £700 quid, but there is a downloadable pdf to make a paper version in these hard times, and you’ll have to make the noises yourself… I digress, while trying to be vaguely design  related.

So changing the subject slightly, Toshio Iwai turns out to be a pretty interesting and talented bloke, ‘Iwai is the first internationally-recognized gallery artist also to have led the creation of several successful commercial video game projects. This cross-disciplinary ability typifies Iwai’s career’. Turns out he is the designer of Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS. There’s an interesting interview with him here over at pixelsurgeon:

PS: I met with some people from Yamaha recently and they talked with me about the challenge of designing new instruments because the standard piano, the violin and so on are so established.

TI: Yes, traditional instruments such as piano and violin have been improved and made sophisticated by many people for a long time. I think it is very difficult to create a brand new instrument in this modern age, but I believe it is worthwhile to challenge this. Even ones like the piano and violin used to be completely new instruments. I am impressed by the fact that these new instruments fascinated many musicians and audiences, and new music and culture saw the light. [Read on]

Anyway, so back to the music, here’s a video of Little Boots playing Hot Chip’s Ready For the Floor on a Tenori-On… which is almost as good as the soulwax remix.

Click here to view the embedded video.