KonzeptioNerd

Shaping Things

I think I first read about Shaping Things on Peter Merholze’s blog. And at any rate, the prospect of reading Bruce Sterling (whose fiction writing I appreciate) on (product) design was quite appealing. However, I guess I need to adopt a different strategy if I hope to get anyone to click through my Amazon links from my book reviews. Shaping Things may be interesting as a documentation of a certain time and scene, but I don’t think I dig it at all.

Sterling appears to be worried about losing control of his digital and digitized obejcts (which he labels “gizmos” or “spimes”). Where David Weinberger is happy about the miscellaneity of things with their tags and barcodes and fluid retrievability, Sterling is all about herding his objects once they’re determined by rampant data. This is what he calls “wrangling”, which is what animal trainers do on film sets, but which term also denotes argumenting on the brink of fighting, if LEO has it right.

Against this loss of control (or lack of controlability), Sterling sets a full taxonomy of objects and a history of technosocial relationships that turns to the theories of economics and colonialism (both anxiety-fraught frames) for patterns and terminology. Interspersed are excursions in design history, because it is designers who Sterling hopes will shape the interfaces that will allow better wrangling of future spimes.

To boot, the book has been “designed” - with an oversized barcode on the back cover and a host of fonts, box styles, background images, internal links and the like on the pages. And while the cover is mainly a pink fade, the interior design is grassy green.

It’s just not my cup of tea. But it’s a whimsical, and perhaps rather nerdy read, good for a train trip of three hours or so. And probably indispensable for those Sterling scholars among you for whom it’ll open a whole new world of interpreting his fictional work.

Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things (Mediawork Pamphlet), The MIT Press, 2005, paperback, 152 pages.

Oh, and some quote of note (mostly to myself, so I won’t have to dig up that notebook again):

The future is yours to make. (p. 13)

In other words, technocultures do not abolish one another in clear or comrehensive ways. Instead, newer capacities are layered onto older ones. (p. 14)

We interact with infrastructures differently in a world with representative design. (p. 23, underlining in original)

When the entire industrial process is made explicit, when the metrics count for more than the objects they measure, then GIZMOS become SPIMES. (p. 23)

Properly understood, a thing is not merely a material object, but a frozen technosocial relationship. (p. 68)

One Response to “Shaping Things”

1. KonzeptioNerd » Blog Archive » Everything is Miscellaneous Says:
   

   [...] Disorder makes a great tandem read to Norbert Bolz’s bang design and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. Weinberger, too, is dealing with things gone out of control. But when items break out of their [...]

   May 3rd, 2008 at 8:49 pm

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