Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things is a treatise on design in the future, where projects and products are imbued with intelligence via the use of technologies such as bar-codes or RFIDs linked to the Web. Sterling’s text is a challenge to young designers to think big, to take advantage of the capabilities that are present or just around the corner; but in doing so Sterling also delivers a compact history of the development of product design.
    We wanted to “activate” the text in a way to pull readers in, and to help them see the patterns and repeated themes in the direct, almost manifesto-like text of Shaping Things. Our approach was to underline and highlight words and passages the way that readers often mark up their own books. We did this by using a palette of fonts that are used to tag specific words every time they appear in the text.
    This book includes a number of charts that are informative but so eccentric that they seemed to call for a different approach than any standard information-design style could supply. Inspired by amateur graphics and high-school newspaper illustration styles, the charts give the book a distinct, humorous twist to the seriousness of the text.