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Wifi, Bluetooth, Radio frequency ID chips
(RFIDs), Global and local positioning systems, digital inventory
systems. To Bruce Sterling, Hugo Award-winning science fiction
author and futurist, these are pieces of a puzzle that need
to be put together if we are going to have a sustainable
future. The completion of this puzzle will allow for a new
relationship between humans and objects, a relationship
that incorporates the advantages of the increasingly information-laden
environment we live in. Shaping Things is for designers
and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and
financiers -- anyone who might want to understand why things
were once as they were, why things are now how they are,
and what things seem to be coming. The vision of Shaping
Things is given material form by the intricate design
of Lorraine Wild.
Sterling has been called by TIME
"perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked
culture working today in any genre." Three of his novels
have been New York Times Notable Books of the year,
and he has been a contributing writer for Wired since
its conception. Here, he offers a brilliant, and often hilarious
history of shaped things. From "artifacts" made
by hand, through to complex "machines," we now
live in an era of "gizmos." These are the highly
unstable, baroquely multi-featured objects, commonly programmable,
with brief lifespans. Looking forward, Sterling coins the
term "Spimes" to describe the coming era of manufactured
objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly
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 throughout their earthly sojourn. Shaping
Things identifies them as a class of objects with specific
qualities -- sustainable, enhanceable, uniquely identifiable,
and made of substances that can and will be folded back
into the production stream of future Spimes -- and challenges
us all to become involved in their production.
Spimes are coming sooner or later. Shaping
Things asks: When will we realize that we need these
structures in order to live and that we can't surrender
their advantages without awful consequences?
Bruce Sterling is "Visionary-in-Residence"
at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.
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