Shaping Things (Mediaworks Pamphlets) (Paperback)

by Bruce Sterling (Author), Lorraine Wild (Designer)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Shaping Things is full of entirely readable large ideas, made palatable by Lorraine Wild's clean but evocative book design. The whole project exudes a confidence-building, you-too-can-be-an-architect-of-the-future tone, much like the work of Buckminster Fuller, who like Sterling was a practical visionary and often had to create a new language to describe his ideas.... In the end, Shaping Things asks us to consider how we can create a sustainable future, using all the information available to us as consumers, without the preachiness that accompanies the environmental and sustainable lifestyle movements."
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Shaping Things is really about shaping experiences. Sterling brilliantly makes you more aware of experiences that your customers have-or don't have-with objects. . . . Shaping Things presents a robust typology of technologies to inspire marketers and provoke innovators into rethinking their market offerings' essential qualities."
— Michael Schrage, Across the Board Magazine

"It's the most thought provoking thing I've read all year....I can tell that this is a book I'll return to again and again and get more out of it each time I do. It's a wonderful and timely work that is a must-read in an age of ubiquitous computation, universal information resources, and hacker-activist renaissance, there's no better primer for putting it all together."
— Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

"Now, with Shaping Things, design gets full-court consideration in a powerfully argued thesis tracking the profession's trajectory toward a new product order. . . . On top of being one of the most strikingly insightful little volumes on the design shelves, Shaping Things, designed by Lorraine Wild, is one of the most originally and empathically crafted pieces of evidence that artifacts do evolve, and that designers may hold the keys to a more sophisticated relationship to the things around us we take for granted."
— Architect's Newspaper

Product Description
"Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything," writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, "Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic."

Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object—we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable—that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.

The vision of Shaping Things is given material form by the intricate design of Lorraine Wild. Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers—and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262693267
• ISBN-13: 978-0262693264
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #101,389 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This item is part of The Mediaworks Pamphlets Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Addresses modern reality in a convincing and fun way, December 10, 2005

By	Gordon E. Anderson (New York City) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A "Spime" may or may not eventually exist in the real world of the near future. A Spime is an object plus it's RFID or wireless ID that tracks the object during it full lifecycle.

What Sterling is trying to do is close the loop on manufacture and design in the modern age. No wait, scratch that: He's really saying that closing the loop via a Spime or something like it will be inevitable.

What do I mean by "closing the loop"? In the book Sterling makes the convincing case that the full impact of industrial output and design is not currently accounted for in the cost and design of objects made and sold. Rather, we "export" a lot of the impact into the future in the form of industrial waste and so on.

Spimes will allow intelligence and statistics about the full impact and lifecycle of objects to be fedback into future capitalism and industry. In fact, Sterling argues that, for future designers and manufacturers, the data representation of an object is potentially far more valuable than the sale price or the object itself. And as crazy as that sounds, in some industries (most notably credit cards) that's already true.

And the strength of this book lays not in the eventual reality of Spimes or the industrial environment Sterling envisions, but in the fact that Sterling attempts to sketch out something akin to a solution to current social & envionmental problems that actually makes sense in the current economic climate of the world. It's a good try, at least.

In terms of the layout, typography and design of the book, it is a hell of a lot of fun. There's plenty of pithy, epigrammatic phrases sprnkled thoughout the book, but over against a backdrop that is large convincing. It's a cute little book that you will definitely spend some time thinking about.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars important work for more than just designers..., June 4, 2006

By	Daniel W. Miller (Dallas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

...or perhaps it's just that "design" is an extremely broad category. Sterling presents a futurity that is at once realistic and utopian, frightening and hopeful.

This book would be useful for not just anyone designing anything, but anyone concerned with the future, how to achieve real sustainability, or how all that geeky stuff (you occasionally read about in the Wired you pick up at the airport) will really effect you.

I agree with another reviewer that the actual print design of the book is a hindrance, which is ironic; my distaste for it was only made worse by having already heard Sterling brag on it during a talk. But even with this beef, I have to give it a full five stars based on the content alone.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars SPIMES = Wired, May 31, 2006

By	Scott Klinker "Designer-in-Residence, Cranbro... (Bloomfield Hills, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In `Shaping Things' Sterling shifts gears from fiction writer to activist. This concise book was written to inspire designers to visualize radical scenarios connecting information technology and sustainability. Sterling suggests new connections between the virtual world and the physical world that will have you rethinking many of your assumptions about how we relate to products. If you design artifacts, machines, gizmos or products, then read this book!
SPIMES = Wired.
Post-Industrial = Tired.
Industrial = Expired.