Bruce Sterling has recently typed out a compact little book commissioned and published by MIT with the help of Lorraine Wild. Its name is Shaping Things. My rough impression of it is shown in the cultural ecology sidebar, as non linear as I could get with word and line. Closer shots are forth coming.
As a trained designer, I have worked parochially for most of my adult life. My instincts are in order and grounded here yet terribly lacking in the sophistication and understanding of how we are going thru our times but for household scale. In catching up to designers working large and with much more power and authority in our industrial surge, I ran across Viridian Design in the whirl of gizmos that is lifting us spinning around. I stuck with its Pope Emperor Sterling and am heartened by his offering readers greater insight, displaying his thinking thru the trajectories in which we seem caught collectively, intervening with a solid push toward ublopia from our always constant flirtation with entropy and otivion.
Giving a essential history of the field of industrial design, he further feathers close shading in the small periods that WIT articulated in our the larger move to planetary biosphere from the oceanic industrial age which is quickly melting behind us. I sketch those tunings again here on the side. They lift off from agriculture and its artifacts of pre 1500 to the age of machines with their customers, around 1900 to products with consumers, into gizmo culture with us their end users in 1989, and now in 2004 into wrangling spimes, those evasive and elusive pics that keep us glued to gizmos and speculatively into realizing ourselves as truly biotic around 2060.
This is enough for starters. Composting as a very shapely thing will be addressed ASAP.
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