Spimodo: Gizmos, Blobjects, Spimes

If you are looking for a visionary talk, Bruce Sterling' Seagraph keynote certainly hits the mark.

It's a call for the designers to conquer not only the digital world, but also the world of atoms. With barcode reader on your cell phone you can already find out the background to a product line and company right in the store. Soon to come so his vision, you will get with every purchase of a product the life history and all other needed information transfered to you too. From the design blueprint to the oh so important way to safely dispose it.

In the whole process you play a part in the feedback loop to the producer, as you do already with your purchases at Amazon: Improving the offerings and the processes of Amazon.com. You become a Wrangler.

He calls these things that go beyond Gizmos: Spimes as in merging the words Space and Time. I agree with Alex from Worldchanging Spime is not a good word, way to close to spine and therefore to spineless. Who wants that?

But it is quite possible, that Spimodo is coming to an RSS reader of your choice soon.

Here the main thoughts and quotes, but better to read the keynote for yourself:

Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms.

It's a new relationship between humans and objects.

The truth about a blobject is that is a physical object that has suffered a remake through computer graphics.

Blobjects are the period objects of our time.

Blobjects, Ruling the Earth. Not just littering it: ruling it. This is an imperial paradigm, a grandiose myth, a historical thesis, a weltanschauung and a grand schemata.

A Gizmo is like a Product that has swallowed a big chunk of the previous society, and contains that within the help center and the instruction manual.

It's because a Gizmo is delicately poised between commodity and chaos.

We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a "Wrangler."

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

A true Spime is going to get ahead of the curve by bringing you inside the tent of the designers and developers and engineers, and the sales and marketing people.

Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.

how much your Spime is worth on an auction site. And especially -- absolutely critically
-- where to get rid of it safely.

Networking is another word for not-working

Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us

The natural world should be better for our efforts and our ingenuity. It's not too much to ask.

The question we must face is: what do we want? We should want to abandon that which has no future. We should blow right through mere sustainability. We should desire a world of enhancement.

Comments

[Chris Phoenix]

The quotes are confusing. They make it sound like blobjects, gizmos, and spimes are the same thing. They're not, and Bruce's point is that they must not be. Spimes are Bruce's proposed solution to the manufacturing problems posed by today's gizmos.

Bruce sees the unsustainability of today's design-industrial complex. He proposes that if we really knew what our products are doing to us, we'd wrangle them more intensely and clean up our mess. He proposes making the use and effects of products transparent--bringing information transparency to physical stuff.

This is certainly a bold vision. I wonder whether it'd be easier to just make all manufacturing clean, with molecular manufacturing. But that might pose its own problems: any time you implement complete control over your own substrate (at the level of atoms, in this case), you risk disrupting your basis for existence. So maybe Bruce's reaction, which is apparently to industrial pollution, is actually to the deeper problem of messing with substrates. And I wonder whether his solution, transparency and the creation of a whole new space of niches for creativity, could solve not only pollution but the larger problem of control-freak destabilizing approaches to resources.

Chris

[Mark Finnern]

Thanks Chris for setting the record straight.

I should have made it more clear, that the quotes were just snit bits from the talk like: Networking is like not working :-)

Please read the whole transcript, it is worth it.

Best, Mark.
> But
> that might pose its own problems: any time you
> implement complete
> control over your own substrate (at the level of
> atoms, in this case),
> you risk disrupting your basis for existence.

Do you have an example for a substrate that got extinct because it had complete control over itself?

That would be interesting, Mark.