Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things: the passages I apparently liked best

All the portions I’ve underlined, or marked in the margin, for whatever reason, in Bruce Sterling’s great Shaping Things. (Where I had to quote more of the context, I’ve indicated the marked parts with like this [emphasis mine].)

There’s not enough time in the world for people to sacrifice infinite amounts of opportunity and cognition. This means that, in a SPIME world, designers must design, not just for objects or for people, but for the technosocial interactions that unite people and objects: designing for opportunity costs and cognitive load. These resources deserve special design attention because these are the resources that are now in scarcity.

In a world of SPIME, the growing problems of attention load and opportunity costs have been finessed. Most probably, they’ve been deputized to powerful information machinery. These processes depend, as search engines do, on social software which can track human desire and interest.

And:

In a SPIME technosociety, most everything has metrics. Human beings and their objects are awash in metrics. There are many ways to make these metrics impinge on my behavior – by making things cost more or less, of course, but also mostly by making their workings more obvious, giving me a stake, and putting them closer to my fingertips. [Emphasis mine.]

When the entire industrial process is made explicit, when the metrics count for more than the object they measure, then GIZMOS become SPIMES. [In margin: ‘hmm’.]

Two dozen pages on:

A SYNCHRONIC SOCIETY has a temporalistic sensibility rather than a materialistic one. It’s not that material goods are unimportant – materials are critical – but material objects themselves are known to be temporary, obsolescing at a slower or faster pace. A SYNCHRONIC SOCIETY conceives of its objects, not as objects qua objects, but as instantiations, as search-hits [my emphasis] in a universe of possible objects. Embedded in a monitored space and time and wrapped in a haze of process, no object stands alone; it is not a static thing, but a shaping-thing. Thanks to improved capacities of instrumentation, things are no longer perceived as static – they move along a clocked trajectory from nonexistence to post-existence.

And:

A SYNCHRONIC SOCIETY sets high value on the human engagement with TIME. We human beings are time-bound entities. So are all our creations. We cannot think, analyze, measure, prove, disprove, hypothesize, argue – love, suffer, exult, despair, or experience a word-less rapture of mystical faith – without a flow of TIME through our flesh. So we are not objects, but processes. Our names are not nouns, but verbs. [Emphasis mine.]

And:

Animals can’t design. Apes will fling objects, but humans will throw objects, practice throwing them, and refine the grain of the material so that the thrown object throws better. Humans have evolved an innate capacity to shape things: they have habits, customs, bodies of transferred know-how. Humans create infrastructure. Humans get far better at interacting with objects than any animal can ever manage; and since humans are also capable of abstract analysis, they are also better at getting better. Humans have technosociety.

And:

We owe to Raymond Loewy the particularly useful acronym MAYA, or, MOST ADVANCED, YET ACCEPTABLE. This formulation is the key to the Loewy oeuvre. MAYA, according to Loewy, is what industrial designers are supposed to to with their skills, for their clients, and to the world. Designers create objects, products, processes, symbols that anticipate the future. However, these innovations can also be metabolized on a broad scale by society in general.

It just will not do to settle for the one activity or the other. MOST ADVANCED would be ivory-tower scientific researchers. YET ACCEPTABLE would be crass mass manufacturers. A designer is neither MA or YA, but MAYA, with all that implies. He is not compromising; no, he is synthesizing! This is not a lack of integrity on a designer’s part, but the very source of integrity.

Designers mine raw bits of tomorrow. They shape them for the present day. Designers act as gatekeepers between status quo and objects from the time to come.

And:

The world does not always beat a path to the better mousetrap. Intelligent designers can create products embodying (as Loewy puts it) “logical solutions to requirements” which “express beauty through function and simplification”. However, these triumphs of Loewy’s design craft cannot succeed in public without some brisk combat in a culture war.

And:

Being designery is not an affectation. Being designery is how one manipulates MAYA in public. Being designery is what one does, as a practical measure, in order to overcome the reactionary clinging to the installed base of malformed objects that maul and affront the customer. What cannot be overcome with reason can be subverted with glamor. That’s what design glamor is for.

And:

ADVANCEMENT and ACCEPTABILITY have to be created by capturing the public imagination. One cannot buy a kilo of ADVANCEMENT or rent a liter of ACCEPTABILITY. These immaterial barriers have to be budged through eye-catching acts of inculcated conviction.

[...] Any absolutely ACCEPTABLE object would have no grain of social resistance. There would be nothing to quarrel over, nothing to discuss, no vector of improvement. An absolutely ACCEPTABLE object would be invisible.

Dozens of pages later:

Suppose that I’m trying to create a new kind of object, to shape a new kind of thing. I don’t want to be burdened with the weighty physicality of the old one. I want a virtual 3-D model of the new one, a weightless, conceptual, interactive model that I can rotate inside a screen, using 3-D design software.

Then I’m not trouble by its stubborn materiality [...].

I can change those immaterial plans as many times as I want. [...]

After a while, once I’m used to this new routine, I don’t even think of my model as “the model” any more. My model has become the central part of the creative effort. The modeling arena is where I shape my things. The physical object itself has become mere industrial output. The model is the manager’s command-and-control platform. The object is merely hard copy. [Emphasis mine.]

And, last one:

IT MAY NOT SEEM THAT I “NEED” ALL THAT INFORMATION [measurements; ‘light exposure, airborne pollution and pathogens, traveling microbes, pollen counts’; ‘Magnetic fields? Tilt? Chemical exposure?’], BUT THAT’S AN OLD-FASHIONED WAY TO THINK. I DON’T “NEED” EVERY WEB PAGE ON THE INTERNET, EITHER. IT’S NOT A QUESTION OF DESIGNING AN INTERNET OF THINGS TO MEET MY SO-CALLED “NEEDS”. IT’S VASTLY CHEAPER AND SIMPLER JUST TO ENABLE AUTOMATIC INFORMATION-GENERATING DEVICES AND PROCESSES, THEN SEARCH THEM MECHANICALLY AND CYBERNETICALLY, TO FIGURE OUT WHAT I “NEED”.

Again, great book, and I should probably check out the rest of the Mediaworks Pamphlets.