Shaping Things

Now, with Shaping Things, design gets full-court consideration in a powerfully argued thesis tracking the profession’s trajectory toward a new product order…On top of being one of the most strikingly insightful little volumes on the design shelves, Shaping Things, designed by Lorraine Wild, is one of the most originally and empathically crafted pieces of evidence that artifacts do evolve, and that designers may hold the keys to a more sophisticated relationship to the things around us we take for granted.

Shaping Things is full of entirely readable large ideas, made palatable by Lorraine Wild’s clean but evocative book design. The whole project exudes a confidence-building, you-too-can-be-an-architect-of-the-future tone, much like the work of Buckminster Fuller, who like Sterling was a practical visionary and often had to create a new language to describe his ideas…In the end, Shaping Things asks us to consider how we can create a sustainable future, using all the information available to us as consumers, without the preachiness that accompanies the environmental and sustainable lifestyle movements.

Shaping Things is really about shaping experiences. Sterling brilliantly makes you more aware of experiences that your customers have—or don’t have—with objects… Shaping Things presents a robust typology of technologies to inspire marketers and provoke innovators into rethinking their market offerings’ essential qualities.

It’s the most thought provoking thing I’ve read all year…I can tell that this is a book I’ll return to again and again and get more out of it each time I do. It’s a wonderful and timely work that is a must-read in an age of ubiquitous computation, universal information resources, and hacker-activist renaissance, there’s no better primer for putting it all together.

Hugo Award-winning science fiction author and futurist Bruce 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. In 2005 he is “Visionary-in-Residence” at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Bruce Sterling’s blog Beyond the Beyond has been active since 2003.Lorraine Wild is an award-winning designer, a founder of Greybull Press, and a member of the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts.

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