Industrial Design: “Shaping things” by Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling wrote a book about the future of industrial design, and I bought it because I knew and appreciated him as one of the best science fiction author, master of the cyberpunk genre.

The Italian version has a different cover (and title, by the way) from the American one: there is a picture of a lemmon with impressed a bar code, very effective in my opinion.

Unfortunately the cover is the only thing that worthes the money. The whole book repeat over and over the idea that in the next future every object (named “spime“) will be location and environment aware, describing a world of spimes talking each other, exchanging information, changing our lives..

My expectation went unfulfilled, I didn’t find anything new and next time I’ll spend some time fiddling around with the mouse over Howard Rheingold‘s website Smart Mobs (named after his amazing bestseller).