We live with a lot of stuff. The average kitchen, for example, is home to stuff galore, and every appliance, every utensil, every thing, is compound–composed of tens, hundreds, even thousands of other things. Although each piece of stuff satisfies some desire, it also creates the need for even more stuff: cereal demands a spoon; a television demands a remote. Rich Gold calls this dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff the “Plenitude.” And in this book–at once cartoon treatise, autobiographical reflection, and practical essay in moral philosophy–he tells us how to understand and live with it.
Gold writes about the Plenitude from the seemingly contradictory (but in his view, complementary) perspectives of artist, scientist, designer, and engineer–all professions pursued by him, sometimes simultaneously, in the course of his career. “I have spent my life making more stuff for the Plenitude,” he writes, acknowledging that the Plenitude grows not only because it creates a desire for more of itself but also because it is extraordinary and pleasurable to create.
Gold illustrates these creative expressions with witty cartoons. He describes “seven patterns of innovation”–including “The Big Kahuna,” “Colonization” (which is illustrated by a drawing of “The real history of baseball,” beginning with “Play for free in the backyard” and ending with “Pay to play interactive baseball at home”), and “Stuff Desires to Be Better Stuff” (and its corollary, “Technology Desires to Be Product”). Finally, he meditates on the Plenitude itself and its moral contradictions. How can we in good conscience accept the pleasures of creating stuff that only creates the need for more stuff? He quotes a friend: “We should be careful to make the world we actually want to live in.”
Customer Reviews
Innovating for a World We Want to Live In:
Lisner Auditorium at GWU in DC hosted a conference “Confronting the Global Triple Crisis: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Global Resource Depletion & Extinction” Sept. 14-16, 2007 sponsored by the IPS and IFG. With the talks from this conference still reverberating in my head, I find “The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff” cutting edge, and had Rich Gold been alive he should have been a speaker at that conference. But to understand the connection between the themes of the conference and the book, you have to read the entire book.
The real connection to a prophetic and visionary view of where we are as a society and culture with lots of “stuff”, comes at the end of the book.
One of my climate change friends saw my book and asked what I was reading. A few chapters into the book, I brushed her off with “its a book about innovation”.
Everyone I know is now Googling “The Story of Stuff” to see an incredible short online cartoon/video by Annie Leonard which was a highlight at the Triple Crisis conference and is now viral online (among climate change activists). For example, Maryland House Member, State Delegate Liz Bobo told me in passing at a coffee shop this AM that she just got the link to “the Story of Stuff and asked me if I had it. Everyone is talking about this video, and all those folks will love this book!
So I told the Maryland State Delegate, and I am now telling all my climate change friends to read “The Plentitude”, Rich Gold’s brilliant confessional, philosophical, moral agonizing about how to live and create. Its short history on innovation helps us understand how we reached our current crisis. But more importantly, this little book raises the key questions, begins the conversation, and provides guidance for all in the West, as we face the creative/moral/spiritual challenges of the 21st Century.
I am so sorry that Rich Gold is gone, and so grateful to those who published this wonderful legacy he left us.
Waste of time:
I realize this book is posthumous, and I mean no disrespect to the author. With that said, this book, as small as it is, was so annoying to read that I put it down before drudging half way through it. The opening preface was pretentious, and the rest just a bunch of rambles of one engineer’s way of looking at things. There were also a plethora of spelling and grammar errors that made this book even more painful to read.
A book for all educators:
I highly recomend the Plentititude to all the creators among us. The Plentitude is succinct and focused. It gives insight into the role of the discipline in which one is trained, how this influences further thought and how this training limits potential solutions. The Plentitude’s greatest gift, is that it demonstrates how we are all designers. This is both a boon to our very existence and the source of our pollution; both thought pollution and physical object pollution.
