Sterling, Bruce - Shaping Things

[oyceter]

Er, I read this very quickly for class, so no deep thoughts here.

First, the book's format is very different; graphic designer Lorraine Wild decided to try and design it in a way that reflected how a generation that grew up on a computer might think of books.

Having sort of grown up on computers, I personally don't think it worked very well, and most of the people in my class seemed to think so too. I don't like having words underlined for me or highlighted, and I really got annoyed when special fonts were used for special words. I think some of it might have helped, much liked bolded text and headers in textbooks, but the special fonts were just too cutesy.

Anyway. Content-wise, Sterling looks very briefly at the past history of design and tries to go for the future. I.e., we have gone from using artifacts to machines to products to gizmos, and tomorrow we will be using "spimes." I am still not quite sure what he defines "spimes" as, except they are futuristic and contain a lot of data and act something like the internet.

As you can tell, I was not overly impressed with the book. I think the ideas are sort of interesting, but I'd rather have more data to back it up, and I am forever skeptical of anything about the future, particularly if it has to do with the future of technology. I suspect this will be more fun to read twenty years later, just to see what Sterling got right and what he didn't.

Comments

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

Hi, here via friendsfriends.

A spime is basically any object with embedded information -- for Sterling, it's a device with an RFID chip that can tell you where it's from, how it was made, how to dispose of it sustainably, etc. RFIDs are also great for locationing, which is mostly how they're used today, so there are all sorts of potential applications you can imagine for spimes. (Think Google Maps, as well as Wal-Mart's vast and near-frictionless factory-to-shopping-cart process.)

It sounds like between this and the Thackera you're reading this for a design class, so I'll tell you that I work for a design firm, and Shaping Things is very influential there. People talk about spimes in meetings. Whether or not things play out the way Sterling imagines, his vision of a world of objects that know things about themselves really caught a particular moment in design and is helping to shape the next one. Thackera, I think, has been influential more in the UK - I know design blogs there have cited his work approvingly far more often than I've seen anyone here do.

[oyceter]

Oh cool, it's neat to know that the books are very influential in the design world. I think I got very frustrated from a web technology point of view: I've read too many books on "This is what the future looks like!" to really be very impressed by them, and I tend to want more detail on implementation, because that's when I find things tend to go wrong at work. Heh.

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

Sterling is totally shooting for "let me inspire you" rather than "this really is how it should work" -- which is usually where people like Don Norman get in trouble! *g*

[oyceter]

Yeah... I think my thing is just that I don't care as much for inspiration as I do for how things work, heh. Which is probably why me and the book didn't get along so well.