The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) | 
 enlarge | Author: Rich Gold
Creator: John Maeda
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
Buy New: $9.96
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 218114
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0262072890
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.35
EAN: 9780262072892
ASIN: 0262072890
Publication Date: August 30, 2007
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Condition: Hard cover with dust jacket Book is Brand new and beautiful. .***** We process orders promptly (out from California within same business day or 24 hrs), bubble wrapped for protection and inform to u with delivery tracking number ....
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Product Description
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."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Outstanding thesis on creativity in the modern world May 20, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Rich Gold was a visionary in the truest sense of the word. His philosophy can be summed up in his "four hats of creativity." They are: scientist, artist, designer and engineer. Gold has at one time worn each of these four hats, he truly was a person well immersed in all facets of the modern implementation of creativity.
His key theme was "the Plentitude", that segment of the human species that has plenty. The Plentitude creates everything from the large architectural structures, to complex electronics to nuclear bombs and "reality" television. As he mentions, it is ironic that the producers of the worst entertainment drivel often do not watch it or allow their children to watch it.
His philosophy of "making stuff" is expressed in these pages and it is something to be taken seriously although he presents it in a decidedly non-serious manner. That nebulous entity called the Plenitude is capable of doing so many things, both good and evil. It is a free market with some controls that all people are trying to comprehend and grasp. As yet, it is hard to determine how to rein it so that it expresses concern for the non-Plentitude masses and builds things with actual rather than perceived value.
This is one of those books that can be read with pleasure by everyone from a marketer to an artist, to a scientist. The people in all of these groups are mentioned in this book, which makes sense because Gold has at one point been a member of each of these classes.
 Californian Baby-Boomer Pablum March 24, 2008
2 out of 15 found this review helpful
The author gracefully switches between describing the completely obvious and preaching at the reader. It recovers a half star for having only 111 small pages with pictures. Reading this book wasted my time, but the book's small size prevented much loss.
 A Moral Philosophy of a Middle-aged Baby-boomer March 20, 2008
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
Richard Goldstein as he reflects in an unusual way what life is all about. He'd written many pulp fiction under the name of Ned Sarti. This bit of philisophical nonsense was illustrated in a primitive manner like Zach did in the '60s when he wrote "stories," playsa and poems and acted them out with his toys, Bat Moneky, G I Joe, and Jeb Stuart among others.
Full of big words, Rich Gold was no dummy. Eddie Roy's favorite "ubiquitous" description of me, "Duplication," "mediatin, "diversity." facilitated, culture, conglomerorated, etc. This is a book about "stuff" as opposed to "junk." While we (Americans) live in the Plenitude, half the world lives on less than two dollars per day. A hundred years ago, nine tenths of the world was in dire poverty. His definition of "stuff" is "something that was individually designed, marketed and sold."
You have to see this book to believe it. R. G. was an inventor, artist, designer, composer, and writer who lectured on many subjects. What he's really saying is that most of us have plenty of junk. I know I do.
Innovating for a World We Want to Live In December 22, 2007
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
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 November 26, 2007
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
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.
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