bruce sterling was born in brownsville, texas on april  14,
1954. he grew up in austin, texas before his family moved
to india when he was only 15. for more than 2 years he
travelled around the world, before returning to texas where
he studied journalism at the university of texas. he graduated
in 1976, focusing on science fiction in his early years, writing
novels, zines and short stories. he pioneered the ‘cyber-punk’
movement in science fiction, which pushed for more cultural relevance in the genre. he founded the ‘dead media project’,
which was an online forum discussing old forms of media
and the ‘viridian design movement’ focusing on sustainability.
in addition to continually writing science fiction works,
sterling recently published two non-fiction futurist books:
‘tomorrow now: envisioning the next 50 years’, which
discusses the future of society and ‘shaping things’, a book
about the future of industrial design. he also served as
‘visionary in residence’ at art center college of design in
california. he currently lives in austin with his wife, serbian
author and film maker jasmina tesanovic.

http://blog.wired.com/sterling

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designboom met bruce sterling in turin on march 17, 2008.
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what is the best moment of the day?
just some pause.
you know, over at cranbrook (university) when (eero) saarinen
was designing, he always said it was cocktail hour (laughs).
it's got to be one of those transitional moments when you've
stopped doing one thing and before you've started doing
something else.

what kind of music are you listening to at the moment?
I've been listening to a lot of medieval music actually.
I am kind of big on historical recordings.

do you listen to the radio?
no.

what books do you have on your bedside table?
well, I don't have a bedside table, but I read a lot of works on
electronic art.

do you read design / art / architecture / fashion magazines?
yes I do and I write for them as well.

where do you get news from?
email and my RSS feeds mostly.

do you have any preferences for how women dress?
not all women, under all circumstances, but yeah I am
keenly interested in how women dress and sort of what
works and what's trendy and how things catch on and so
forth. I'm not judgmental about it but I am something of a
fashion fan.

what kind of clothes do you avoid wearing?
I try to not wear anything I can't sleep in, in a plane.

do you have any pets?
no.

when you were a child, did you want to become a writer?
no, not really. when I was a child I wanted to be a reader.

where do you do your writing?
I have a laptop, so I can pretty well make it happen anywhere.

do you discuss your work with other writers?
yes, I do. I'm a big devotee of writer's workshops.
I take critics very seriously.

what project has given you the most satisfaction?
we just finished 'share festival' in turin yesterday and it's
an effort I've been involved in for 6 months. it was pretty
elaborate and it sucked up a lot of emotional and
organizational energy. so now that we're closing it down,
I’m naturally elated by it and pleased that it went well.

are there any designers and/or architects from
the past who you appreciate a lot?



I'm a big devotee of design history.
I learn a lot from the past and I am a futurist.
any good futurist is a historian.
I am always looking for long-term trends and definitive
figures. all the kind of movers and shakers of different
regions and historical periods. I like the original
founding titans of the industrial design profession,
(henry) dreyfuss, (norman) bel geddes and (walter) dorwin
teague. I'm very interested in their approach to things,
how they angled it, how they put coalitions of people together,
how they mapped out a little social area in which they could
promote themselves and get paid. I like to look at how they
generated business, changed things, what they were
thinking, what they were writing to one another and so forth.

and those still working today?
there are many contemporary designers who are personal
friends of mine, so I'm a design groupie and I've been
hanging out in the design world a long time.
quite frankly, I found them personally charming.
it has become a bit difficult for me to maintain the proper
critical objectivity over that, whether this guy is really great
or he's just really a great pal of mine and people who are
quite famous right now are not necessarily going to be
famous 50 years from now.

what was your aim as guest curator for 'share festival'?
I think that a festival should be about people having a
good time and that's kind of job one. if it's not a party and
everybody is really sober about it, then people are just grim
and are uncomfortable about it.
turin is proclaimed to be the ‘world design capital’
and this is a city which has a lot of really basic 20th century
problems and is trying to become a contemporary
21st century city. so I'm not from turin and I'm not around,
but I'm hoping to give the creative community a shot in the
arm. to me they kind of look like some tall dry grass and
they just need a couple of matches to contribute something
on a global scale. so I’m hoping to inspire them and just
give them access to tools and ideas, maybe do a bit of good
old fashioned moral boosting and you know they have got
a lot to offer.

you have only designed a few objects yourself, how do
you approach the process of design as a designer?
I don't want to design because I'm not just not any damn
good. I mean, I'm about as good as some guy who
makes a lot of lamps and you sort of say ‘why don't you
write a science fiction story’ and he's like ‘oh yeah,
that will be easy’. ok, it is easy, but it's easy to do a really
crap job. my lamp is basically a constantine boym knock off.
the boyms wrote this book ‘curious boym’, in which they
describe their weird hobby of going into home depot
and repurposing objects on shelves.
I thought 'hell I could do that'. I'm not a form giver,
I can't draw or model things in 3 dimensions.
I don't have any kind of classic design skill whatsoever,
but I can do that conceptual pastiche stuff.

related to 'ubiquitous computing',
you coined the term ‘spime’...
I was at the high ground design conference in buena
vista, colorado where they have their yearly summit
of design weirdos. (actually I'm the only weirdo there,
everybody else there are sober practitioners,
museum curators and so forth.)
I was talking about my effort to describe ubiquitous
computing, because I wanted to write a science fiction
novel about it. I realized that ubiquitous computing
has two basic conceptual problems: first of all, it isn't
ubiquitous and second it isn't computing!
if you look at it from an object centric or user centric point
of view, rather than saying 'computing must cover the
earth in a cloud of internet connectivity', you kind of have
to 'name an object' that carries those capacities with it.
a thing with imbedded processing that can access networks.
I just said ‘spime’, because it was about space and time and
tracking a narrative of objects through ubiquitous space.
it just hit me out of left field in the keen social
embarrassment of the moment.

what role should sustainability play in design?
in the world of ubiquitous computing, sustainability is really
what ubiquitous computing is good for. people ask why
does everything have to be connected to everything
and all in 'a cloud of connectivity'.
it's so you can build a sustainable industrial structure
and it's really kind of the only thing that scales,
like the scope of the problem. see the immense
moral dilemma over plastic shopping bags.
the bag is not the problem, it's the entire production system
that delivered the contents of the bag. designers might think
‘oh, I'm going to wrap it in cotton instead of poly vinal chloride’.
it's a complete non issue!
it's just a burst of political correctness. design has
something to play in here, but so does engineering,
logistics and manufacturing.
designers have a really wide brief and I would expect
them to be involved in sustainability issues, just not
necessarily the way those are framed today.

do you think that design is living up to its potential?



that's a really good question and you know the answer is
yes and no. a lot of designers think that their line of work
has been unnaturally stunted, that they're being repressed
or held back. they think that modernism should have swept
the world without resistance and we should all be living in
plastic moulded bauhaus creations and so forth and that
kind of design cultural imperialism is, I think, wrong headed.
but design should be ambitious and it should sort of try to
flow into the nooks and crannies of society and help people
out. it does rather a lot of that, more so than a lot of
other fields. you know if you were to ask me ‘is the military
living up to their potential?’ I think they're doing a poorer job
than designers. ‘is the law living up to it's potential?’
you know the law is a noble pursuit, but do we have justice?
no! if you're a lawyer should you be contented at the state
of the legal profession? you know, probably not, but should
you give up being a lawyer? no! I think a lot of the problems
that design has is that design has difficulty taking 'yes' for
an answer. if somebody says 'I want to redesign the entire
industrial system' like we want some bruce mau style
massive change. alright, bruce mau can describe massive
change, but he can't really administrate massive change.
he's just an educator and graphic designer, he can't
dismantle exxon mobile single handedly. it's a good thing to
say because there will be massive change, I quite guarantee
it. how much of the massive change designers are able to
guide or ameliorate or humanize in any way, is very much
an open question.

what advice would you give to the young?



I hate to say this absolute bullshit design professor stuff,
but really - follow your bliss!
I mean try and do something that you don't mind doing.
if you get into some line of work that's like a pain in the
ass but it pays a lot, it's not really going to be worth it
and you won't do a very good job.
so you need to find something you can really engage
with, it's kind of your ‘métier’ and get some chops there.
don't be a 'dilettante' about it, you really want to drill
down and become a professional.
as a designer you need a very broad range of interests
and you need to be able to talk to a lot of people in a
double headed, kind of chameleon way.
so it's very handy to have some sort of political skills as
a designer and the ability to assemble a coalition of people
and talk in the language of branding, manufacturing,
logistics, shipping or ecology or these various other safety,
utility or ergonomics. you need to find one aspect of that
very wide brief and really drill down.
you need to get really good at something and not just
flutter like a social butterfly from one topic to another.

what are you afraid of regarding the future?
I'm very worried about climate change.
it's like it's here and it could kill us off.
it's a bad scene, it's a major threat to civilization.






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more
read the designboom article on the 'manufacturing'
exhibition shown at the 2008 'share festival',
curated by bruce sterling.