The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff

by Rich Gold

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262072890
• ISBN13: 9780262072892
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 111 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.6" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Fantastic

I really wish I could sit down and have a beer with Rich Gold. Read this book if you are like me, and wear more than one "hat" (I am a biologist with an art degree who likes to weld and rebuild old cars-oh and I'm female). Rich gives one ideas about how to maximize one's life's work, and to be true to one's inner artist. He describes the world of technology and innovation in a totally fresh way. Brilliant. In my opinion, one of the great thinkers of our time.

An Enlightening Read

This book woke me up from a 30 year slumber. It brought me back to the "anti-materialist" discussions we had in college and grad school. Really makes one pause and reflect on our contribution to making all this stuff. Cf. dinner table discussion in the movie "Home for the Holidays".

Outstanding thesis on creativity in the modern world

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.

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.

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.