Shipping Container
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.

1120272020
Shipping Container
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.

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501303142
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 01/28/2016
Series: Object Lessons
Pages: 160
Product dimensions: 4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Craig Martin is Reader in Design Studies in the School of Design at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he teaches on the postgraduate Design for Change programme. He is the author of Deviant Design (Bloomsbury, 2022), Shipping Container (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-editor, with J. Rugg, of Spatialities (2011).

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Packaging Stuff
2. 20 x 40 x 8 feet: Design and Development of a Global Object
3. Twist Lock: Global Object of Capitalism
4. Breaking the Seal: Illicit Lives of the Container
5. Four Walls: Container Afterlives:
6. Conclusion: Global Object to Come
Index

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