5 things Barbie can remind us about design
Reflections on the craft from a movie about a plastic doll
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I watched Barbie last week.
It was great. You should see it.
(Yes, I also watched Oppenheimer, which was also great. See that too!)
I went in with zero expectations. I wasn’t even all hyped up for it like everyone else. It was a spur of the moment decisions with a group of friends on a hot summer day.
Kind of the best way to see any movie, if you ask me.
I was surprised by the thoughtful, witty, funny, impeccably acted, and beautifully crafted movie I got. And being a designer, I couldn’t help but draw from it some thoughts about our relationship to objects and the craft of design.
After seeing the movie, I read a profile of the director, Greta Gerwig, in the New York Times Magazine (paywall) that expanded on some of those thoughts beautifully. I’ll share some quotes and reflections from that piece with you here today. I’d highly recommend you read the original piece, too!
Things have meaning
Gerwig understands both the love and the loathing for Barbie, but for many others, the doll remains an either/or proposition: Either she’s feminist or she’s really, really not. Arguments that she is feminist include the fact that she has had her own Dreamhouse since 1962, when women were routinely denied mortgages and credit cards. She went to the moon years before Neil Armstrong, and unlike any real-life American woman, she has been president.
Not being Barbie’s main target market, I had only heard about her second-hand as an affront to feminism and a manifestation of unrealistic body standards. I was surprised to learn that some saw her as the complete opposite: a symbol of female empowerment and career freedom.
A simple piece of plastic can embody a variety of deep meaning to different people, depending on their own viewpoints and experiences. And our collective consciousness about certain objects can change dramatically over time.
For me as a designer, this serves as a reminder that we are never just designing a thing. It’s a thing that people will live with (hopefully for a long time), and a thing that they might have complex emotions about.
Whatever you’re designing, that’s a big responsibility.
We’re in constant conversation with inanimate objects
I kept thinking: Humans are the people that make dolls and then get mad at the dolls,” Gerwig explained. “We create them and then they create us and we recreate them and they recreate us. We’re in constant conversation with inanimate objects.
We create things and then they create us.
Our lives are shaped by the inanimate objects we surround ourselves with. I love how Gerwig expresses this as a “constant conversation”, as it perfectly captures the push and pull we experience with our stuff.
As a designer creating mass produced objects, you have the chance, however small, to be a part of that conversation. What you make will be something that shapes the life of the user in a small or a big way.
This is something that I’ll definitely keep in mind when it feels like I’m just pushing out another injection molded piece of plastic into the world.
Art and commerce are not mutually exclusive
Mattel wanted a summer blockbuster to kick off its new wave of brand-extension movies. She [Gerwig] wanted it to be a work of art.
It is a giant corporate undertaking and a strange, funny personal project. It is a jubilant, mercilessly effective polymer-and-pink extravaganza whose guiding star turns out to be Gerwig’s own sincerity. “Things can be both/and,” she said. “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.”
This movie could have easily been a pretty mindless, 100-minute commercial for Barbie dolls and nobody would have been surprised.
But it wasn’t.
It was a work by an artist with a point-of-view and a story to tell that came through beautifully. That will also serve to sell Barbie dolls.
Gerwig’s self-ware observation that it’s possible to pursue art and personal meaning while serving a corporate behemoth really stood out to me because that’s a fine line that designers often find themselves treading.
Design is always in collaboration with business and commerce. Otherwise it would be fine art. This can sometimes lead designers feeling jaded about the craft, thinking that it’s all a game of spreadsheets and numbers anyway.
It’s helpful to remember that no matter how commercial, mass-produced, or steered by business decisions your design work is, there’s always an opportunity to put an artist’s touch into it.
Design can be both art and commerce.
Colors are never just about color
While preparing the movie, her creative team considered hundreds of shades of pink, but Gerwig arrived one day convinced that they had let their adult sensibilities lead them astray: The pink had gotten too tasteful. They needed something supersaturated, bold and bright — not salmon. Nothing about the movie should feel “like an adult telling a little kid: ‘Don’t talk too loud. Don’t chew with your mouth open.’ You wanted it to be that exuberance of using the brightest color in the box.”
The biggest unlock for me as a designer thinking about color was when I realized that colors were never just colors.
It was never just about whether a certain shade looked nice on a product or in combination with other colors (though that certainly matters). It was more about the feeling and the story that the color conveyed.
I loved reading this nugget about how they picked the exact right shade of pink for the movie. In the end, it was going against their adult sensibilities and tapping into a sense of child-like exuberance that helped them pick a color that aligned with the feeling and message of the movie.
I wish I had seen the table of pink Pantone chips they considered!
Products don’t sell products
Mattel, Warner Brothers and the producers let Greta Gerwig make “Barbie” so that exactly what is currently happening would happen. So that the fizzy marriage of filmmaker and material would break though the cacophony of contemporary life and return a retirement-age hunk of plastic to the zeitgeist.
This is the bet: that a good movie will drive near-infinite brand synergies. It will make other talent keen to work in the Mattel Cinematic Universe. It will expand Barbie’s demographic appeal. It will launder the doll and her content universe for naysayers and those still on the fence. It will make Barbie so omnipresent that children will turn to the adults in their life and say, “I want a Barbie doll,” and the adults will not wince. Kreiz is very clear on this: If the movie works, it will sell toys.
For a movie kind of transparently designed to sell Barbies, there wasn’t a single product shown that you could actually buy. The products shown were all vintage dolls that you could only buy on eBay and mostly used as gags.
This is the brilliance of Mattel’s marketing strategy.
This movie doesn’t directly sell you anything. It returns Barbie, which had honestly become sort of a cultural has-been, right to the center of the contemporary conversation and makes you feel good about her, despite all her flaws and past controversies.
It’s the car commercial with the happy family where the car barely shows up. It’s the iPod ad where you can barely see the device, but you can see how much fun people are having dancing to their own music on the go.
Too often, designers fixate on the thing they design. The features, the specs, the product porn. But Mattel and Barbie remind us that its not the products that sell the product. It’s the emotions that the products represent and the culture around the product.
I honestly got a lot out of this movie.
It’s a visual spectacle, it’s a really fun and engaging story, and it’s full of laughs. The reflections and deeper thoughts on design were really just a nice surprise.
Did you see the Barbie movie? What reflections on design and object culture did you get from it?
If you’re interested in reading the article I quoted from, but don’t have a New York Times subscription, I can “gift” the article to 10 people through my subscription, so just shoot me a reply and I’ll send you a link!
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