"Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is tosay, it's about everything," writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the MediaworkPamphlet series. He adds, "Seen from sufficient distance, this is a smalltopic."Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. Wehave moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to thecurrent era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lackhistorical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms ofenergy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future willsee a new kind of object;we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets andbriefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable;that will besustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime"for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensiveand rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely trackedthrough space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into theproduction stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved intheir production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects inorder to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awfulconsequences.The vision of Shaping Things is given material form by the intricatedesign of Lorraine Wild. Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers andscientists, entrepreneurs and financiers;and anyone who wants to understand and bepart of the process of technosocial transformation.