The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff

by Rich Gold, John Maeda (Foreword)

Lessons from and for the creative professions of art, science, design, and engineering: how to live in and with the Plenitude, that dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff that creates the need for more of itself. 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.

Genres: Design, Art, Business, Game Design, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Sustainability

111 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2007

About the author

Rich Gold (1950-2003) was an artist, composer, designer, inventor, lecturer, and writer. Equally at home in the worlds of avant-garde art, academia, and business, he worked at various times for Sega, Mattel, and Xerox PARC.

Reviews

[Will]

Preposterously poorly edited posthumous collection of the author's somewhat meandering thoughts on materialism, consumer culture, design, and the linkages between them. Been done elsewhere, significantly better. Were I this guy, I would haunt the hell out of whoever edited this book.

[Jay French]

An interesting, though not unique, way of thinking about the mass market world is presented in “The Plenitude”. The plenitude is the world of plenty of, in the author’s words, stuff. Or junk when he’s feeling less charitable. The book is a collection of the writings based on speeches that the author gave to various groups about the past and future of the plenitude as well as the kinds of jobs that are needed to create and expand the plenitude. This is a short book that includes graphics from the PowerPoint presentations the author used in his speeches. It reminded me in length, format, and tone of those books expanding on famous people’s commencement speeches. It’s goal is to give some food for thought on one’s role in creating the plenitude, and this goal is met – made me think.

[Kate]

Rich Gold was a cartoonist, musician, toy inventor and researcher at Xerox PARC until his untimely death at 50-something in the early 2000s. He had begun speaking on creativity and innovation, and this very short work is a collection of his talks. Because he understood corporate creativity so well, from so many angles (scientist, artist, engineer and designer), he was uniquely positioned to talk about the major activity of the United States corporate hegemony under which most of us reside, both in the US, and in a great deal of the rest of the world: The materialist blanket of expendable stuff he calls The Plenitude. He says he loves "making stuff." And yet, toward the end of the book, he acknowledges that "The Plenitude" is also likely to destroy the planet. His perspective is limited in this short book. His editor was choosing between presentations he'd given largely to corporate audiences, so we don't know the whole scope of Gold's thought--only what was more or less acceptable to those paying his speaker's fees. He has no statements about the influence of profit, power and politics on the Plenitude. That is sorely lacking in this book. He seems to operate from the perspective that our current corporate structure is a given--even though it is so incredibly destructive.

In his more cynical moments he calls his subculture of product creators "The Stuff Tribe." In his MOST cynical moments he calls his subculture "The Junk Tribe" because, basically, as an engineer/designer, he makes junk. 80% of all toys that Mattel makes for the market each year are gone by the following year. Junk. And 80% of the new toys are new "innovations."

His conclusion, after exploring five possibilities for cleaning up The Plenitude, is to simply be mindful, as an engineer/designer, to make stuff the planet can live with. Not a very satisfying conclusion to me. And I get the sense that he didn't find it a very satisfying conclusion, either. I gave this a three, even though I wasn't satisfied at the end, because he made me think about things in a different, unfamiliar light. I've become so accustomed to reading works that are pedantic and opinionated. This book wasn't like that. Gold definitely seemed like he was trying to sort out the contradiction--indeed, he mentions several times that contradiction is part and parcel of morality. How true. I'm so sorry that his life was cut short, and he never had a chance to fill out his thought more broadly. However limited this book may be, it's worth a read.

[Laura Santoso]

Fun short perspective about the culture of creativity and production.

[Noelia]

Un libro que descubrí por casualidad cuando hacía una visita "turística" a la facultad de Bellas Artes, es un libro que te explica el funcionamiento de la economía desde un punto de vista interno y escarmentado, no cómo los profesores de economía que te enseñan lo útil y necesario que es aprender a producir más, sino desde el punto de vista de alguien que se encarga de diseñar productos y nota la incomodidad y desventajas que su trabajo como "productor de basura" puede generar, aunque a pesar de todo le encante su trabajo. ¿Cómo se podría mejorar la Plenitud actual?

[Shahriar Shahrabi]

I really enjoyed this book. It is not perfect by any means, and you might find yourself disagreeing with how the author sees certain things. But that is not the point, because the content is ultimately a matter of subjective opinion. What I really enjoyed was that it brought me new perspectives

[Sml BioBot]

A fun and light read.

[Abbey Piatt Price]

Good read good advice

[Gina]

Great little read for designers, engineers, makers, and livers alike.

[Farhan Khalid]

The United States partly bases its dominance of the world on its supposed creativity

Creativity is making something new that also opens up a new category, a new genre, or a new type of thing

The 4 hats of creativity I have worn

SCIENCE

This is the newest hat of the four

The difference between science and alchemy is where those laws are placed

The latter believing that they are in the supernatural, the former that they're in nature itself

Science is not a democracy

ART

FINE ARTISTS work from within themselves, from their visions. They try to express themselves and their ideas

Art and society are strange and perfect twins

POPULAR ARTISTS focus less on their inner vision than on the emotions of their audiences

FOLK ARTISTS make art for themselves and for their friend

They engage in art making not because it will last forever, or because it will please a million people

But because it is fun, enjoyable, and satisfying

Because it is a way of interacting with and strengthening the bonds between friends and family

For an artist user-testing is a joke. For a designer it is fundamental

If an artist looks inward as a way of seeing the world, the designer looks outward towards others

An artist paints a painting, stares at it, and says, "isn't it beautiful, it expresses my inner vision perfectly"

The designer paints a painting, stares at, then turns it around to the audience and asks

"Do you like it? No? Then I'll change it"

"[because] I care about you"

Designers have employers

ENGINEERING

Engineering is the hat of problem solving, of rules of thumb

It is "necessity is the mother of invention" and "do no harm"

The hat of engineering is closely related to the hat of design. Both works from need and desire

There is misunderstanding that designers work from inner vision and not problem solving

Engineering is the oldest hat of the four creative hats

Science, to the engineer, does two things:

First, it presents new equations about the how the world works that enable the finding of engineering solutions

Second, science creates new desire and needs that engineers must then solve

Design and engineering create the physical artifacts by which we interact and communicate with one another

Your cloth is a visual language that is perpetually speaking

Design without art, or engineering without science, both quickly asymptote to commodity

And in the globalized world, if you are merely producing commodity, you're dead

PATTERNS OF INNOVATION

A vision comes to a special mind, in many ways above critique or even reason

Visions are not about solving problems

Find the unowned. Package it. And then sell it back. This amazingly works

Change the definition

Language and metaphor create/are the world

Language is not a representation of the world, it is a tool in the world

PLENTITUDE

To be not creative is to "think inside the box"

Western though: life is the hard-ass fight for survival and only the toughest, the meanest, the fittest, the most ruthless survive

Life is hard

Plentitude evolution: "Almost everything works"

The plentitude has related names such as "Progress" and "Industry"

There is no activity I can think of that I enjoy more than making stuff for the Stuff Culture, junk for the Junk Culture

DOABLE THINGS

Pass a law

A fundamentalist rejects the plentitude

The real problem is too many people

Just love it. We are invisible at the scale of the universe

We should be careful to make the world we actually want to live in - Stu Card

[Sida Li]

Will plenitude destroy human beings? The author thinks so, due to the obvious environmental and societal impacts we are all aware of. There's even a hypothesis in astronomy that the reason that we haven't found extraterrestrial intelligence is because all civilizations die off at their infant level due to the same reasons.

I have a slight disagreement with the author's fatalism. I don't think anyone can predict the future. Even if they can predict what's going to happen, they can never predict when. The nuclear war threat from a couple of decades ago is a good example. Before it happens, our technology, and even our society, may evolve drastically. Who knows if we will be able to collect atomic power safely, let singularity solve problems for us, or alter our "greed" genes?

It is easy to be optimistic and ignorant, denying global warming for instance. It is also easy to be pessimistic and just enjoy the day. What is difficult is to be educated and optimistic. I strongly believe that our choice on what we believe will influence the outcome. As shown in many survival stories, the ones who give up hope are the first to die. Maybe we need more believing and less predicting. Maybe that way we will take more positive actions.

[Turi Becker]

I finished this little book about a week ago, but am just getting around to posting about it. Don't have that much to say, really - It's basically the condensed wisdom from one of the talks of Rich Gold, who was apparently quite a modern renaissance man. He talks about science, art and technology, and how they all contribute to what he calls the Plenitude - the huge amount of, well, stuff that we all produce. He seems a bit conflicted about this, at times defending it and at other times calling it "junk culture." But an interesting little book.

[Julie Giles]

This little book is so cool!! It gives a great perspective on how we think about innovation and the "stuff" we buy, sell, and use every day. Plus it highlights how important it is to remember that each of us is more than a sum of our parts, and sometimes it is important to rock the boat.

[Andrew Horton]

Quick, fascinating little look at the intersection of Art, Design, Engineering, and Science and how these disparate philosophies come together to make "stuff" - the "plenitude" of consumer objects that we swim in. A thoughtful and interesting little exegesis.

[Alejandro Masferrer]

Great short book about innovation seen from the capitalism perspective. Don't expect the typical book that gives you tips about how to be more innovative and creative. Instead of that, expect a book that will challenge the idea of our economical system and the need of "making stuff".

[Lou]

thought-provoking and short!

[David Lau]

This book is a nice, open ended discussion on how we can move forward with conscious and progressive innovation. However it's broad and I don't see it being very directly applicable.

[See-ming Lee]

A fun and light read.

[Chade66]

Meh.

[Rendell]

A few good tips on innovation ideas and moral guide towards creation. Thinking in different hats. And the smallness of human brain.

[Ethan]

Some nice philosophical reflections on what kind of culture we live in and whether or not it is the best it can be.