Shipping Container (Object Lessons)

Product Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there, clanking on the docks just out of sight…. 90% of the goods and materials that move around the globe do so in shipping containers. It is an absolutely ubiquitous object, even if most of us have no direct contact with it. But what is this thing? Where has it been, and where is it going? Craig Martin’s book illuminates the “development of containerization”―including design history, standardization, aesthetics, and a surprising speculative discussion of the futurity of shipping containers.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Review

“The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary―even banal―objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this thing?'”―Steven Johnson, best-selling author of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World”The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory legend Ian Bogost and cultural studies academic Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays and small, beautiful books about everyday objects from shipping containers to toast. The Atlantic hosts a collection of “mini object-lessons”, brief essays that take a deeper look at things we generally only glance upon (‘Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be “done?” Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?’). More substantive is Bloomsbury’s collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth.” ―Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing“Shipping Container discusses in detail the mechanics of this object. It broadens this out to reflect on the significance of design and the efficiencies of standardization. Verdict: Borrow. Shipping Container is impressive in the way it manages to spin an apparently dull object into intelligent and interesting explanations of design and commerce.” –Book Riot

About the Author

Craig Martin is Professor of Religious Studies, St. Thomas Aquinas College, USA.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of
The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2013) and
The End of Airports (2015) and co-editor of
Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons.

Ian Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. Bogost is author or co-author of seven books:
Unit Operations (2006),
Persuasive Games (2007),
Racing the Beam ( 2009), Newsgames (2010),
How To Do Things with Videogames (2011),
Alien Phenomenology (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and
10 PRINT CHR (205.5+RND(1)); : Goto 10 (2012). Bogost also creates videogames that cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally. His game A Slow Year, a collection of game poems for Atari, won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 Indiecade Festival.