Christopher Diaz-Mihell
DAI 227, David Cox
May 16, 2011
Week 15 DAI 227 Questions
1) In the article "Between a Blob + a Hard Place" Steven Skov Holt & Mara Holt Skov argue in the File InCA_Spring05.pdf (on page 20) that the 'blobject' phenomenon really took off in the ID (industrial design) profession in the 1990s. Why?
- Because the 1990s was a “time marking the beginning of a particularly critical period in the ID profession, a time when the bits and bytes of computer-aided technologies magically flowed together in the service of a new liquid vision”(p. 22). Though designers had always wanted to achieve curvaceous forms the explosion of blobjects is most accredited to the increasing power of CAD, modeling techniques, the development of new materials, production methods and rapid prototyping.
2) Which year in the 1990s was a watershed?
- 1998 is the year Holt and Skov identify as the watershed.
3) What three other products were introduced this year that were good examples of blobjects?
- The “five flavor” iMacs from Apple, the VW beetle, and the Triax from Nike.
4) On page 29 of "Shaping Things" Bruce Sterling describes when a 'gizmo' becomes a 'spime'. Copy the sentence here.
- “When the entire industrial process is made explicit, when the metrics count for more than the object they measure, then gizmo becomes spime” (p. 23).
5) On page 45 of "Shaping Things" Bruce Sterling describes a defining characteristic of a Synchronic Society. Quote him here.
- A SYNCHRONIC SOCIETY synchronizes multiple histories. In a SYNCHRONIC SOCIETY, every object worthy of human or machine consideration generates a small history. These histories are not dusty archives locked away on ink and paper. They are informational resources, manipulable in real time. A SYNCHRONIC SOCEITY generates trillions of catalogable, searchable, trackable trajectories: patterns of design, manufacturing, distribution and recycling that are maintained in fine-grained detail.”
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