Chicago's Music Box Theater was sold out Wednesday night for Gary Hustwit’s screening of Objectified. An audience of architects, industrial designers, writers, graphic designers and interactive thinkers enjoyed the documentary film about the people who re-examine and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis.

The film opened with a quote from Henry Ford, "Every object tells a story” but added, “If you know how to read it." The searching and questioning of people’s everyday lives is what lead Hustwit to start this particular project. And those questions grew out of his feature-length independent film from 2007 about typography, graphic design andglobal visual culture—Helvetica.

With 80 hours of filming and 6-months of editing, Hustwit featured many significant modern industrial designers:Karim Rashid discussed the intersections and possibilities between design and technology, IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri spoke about moving designers away from their desks and towards end-users to inspire design, and Apple’sJonathan Ive explained design’s pivotal, meticulous role in everything from the iPhone to the manufacturing process (utilizing screen extrusions to make keyboards).

After the credits rolled, applause erupted as Hustwit and Dan Formosa, founder of Smart Design, who was featured in the film, took the stage for Q&A. It was a provocative conversation about whether consumerism drives design or vice versa.

Hustwit commented that his attitude towards manufactured goods has changed after spending time with each designer. He considers industrial design in terms of "considerate consumerism,” meaning that as designers and consumers we must think about our material purchases from many angles, sustainable implications being just one of them.

Hustwit stressed that, like Helvetica, Objectified is a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) production that was funded on credit cards, and people buying posters, DVD's and attending events like the Chicago screening. So kudos to AIGA’s supportive membership and kudos to Hustwit for pursuing these conversations to educate, explore and inspire us all.