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Sterling, Bruce - Shaping Things
Sun, Jun. 10th, 2007 08:36 pmEr, 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.
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.
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