My third book The New Design Documentary will be published in 2027 by Bloomsbury. In it I provide a critical analysis of films about design, most crucially several recent documentaries, representing design on film since 2007. Through these films designed objects, graphics, spaces, buildings, photographs, and other visual and material artifacts of design and their creators are pictured as recent and historic creative activity. All of these are defined by the boundaries of the camera’s lens as a space set aside to view design that feels expansive but is sometimes quite narrow. These documentary interpretations present designs that we see and touch every day as suddenly much more present, rather than as they are often assumed to be; a series of discrete artifacts, heroic monuments to their creators, stylistic vanity projects, crass materialistic objects, or media commodities. These documentaries merge with the delight we take in looking at the world through the language and form of film but also often reinforce notions of race and gender, especially male-whiteness.
Peter Claver Fine, Digital Folk Artist, Designer, and Author