Blogject (n.) - A portmanteau of blob and object, a blobject is a household item or device distinguished by its smooth, rounded, almost seamless design. The iPod is a classic blobject, and its popularity has radically popularized the blobject design ethos. Blobjects owe their existence largely to computer-aided design and manufacturing, and you can see early inklings of its association with futurism in early 1970s sci-fi television and movies, where the smooth "plastic fantastic" designs of Logan's Run and its ilk took hold. This aesthetic was mainstreamed, arguably, by Star Trek: The Next Generation where rounded edges and buttonless interfaces were the norm. Everything was seamless, plastic, and disposable. In some ways, the steampunk movement arose as a repudiation of the blobjectivism of mainstream design, with the individualized, customized, constantly-tinkered-with and constantly maintained bulk and clatter of steampunk tech (and its associated DIY culture) rejecting the upgrade-every-year trendiness and assumed vacuousness of blobject ownership.
I bring it up because: I am presently at the Consumer Electronics Show, and though I wrote this entry before I left (Planning!) I fully expect CES to be dominated both by already know blobjects (Google's Nexus One) and speculation about possible future blobjects (Apple's iSlate tablet). It's just one more step towards an ability to instantly manufacture anything we can mock up in a CAD program -- hello 3D printing, which is already scheduled to be demo'd at this year's CES -- which is itself another increment on our journey towards Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge's predicted techno-singularity. Just so long as the future has Wi-Fi, I'm cool.
I'm off to the Consumer Electronics Show this week, so I'm shamelessly and indefensibly shirking my trivia responsibilities yet again. To fill the void, here's some tech-toy themed minutia from my old Geek Trivia columns:
While Bill Gates may have a personal wealth that dwarfs the gross national product of many third-world countries, and Microsoft boasts a cash flow that would make some state revenue cabinets envious, jumping headlong into the multibillion-dollar gaming hardware market was still quite a daring leap for a software company. The man who convinced Gates and, perhaps more important, Steve Ballmer to get in the game, so to speak, was Xbox development chief J Allard. ...
Allard drew his inspiration for the Xbox 360 not just from more traditional sources of product development and market research, but also from science fiction—including a noted sci-fi novel that Allard made required reading for his entire Xbox 360 development team.
WHAT SCIENCE-FICTION NOVEL DID XBOX 360 DEVELOPMENT CHIEF J ALLARD REQUIRE HIS TEAM MEMBERS TO READ?
