Hi Kevin, With the classification and nomenclature of Biological species as a model, perhaps setting out (or finding an existing) "Higher Classification" of "All Things" would define your request to advantage.
"Domestic" could be Family level with Genus level for House, Garage, Outhouses/Workshops/Sheds, Garden, etc. Dining rooms, Kitchen, Hall, Washroom would then be Sub-Generic. Species with a place of their own will be happy species.
I am resonalbly sure that Museums can provide lists of high-level topics.
Must be a good idea; it sounds habit forming. Stan.

Hi Kevin

There was a finnish designer (can't help with name i'm afraid) who has catagorised the evolution of objects in design and listing various branches of the family tree.

I believe he is still alive, and did a show in milan last year or the year before.

I hope this helps, i'm sure a little net searching may bring this to the fore.

Kevin...Shirley (McLaine) you jest !

I have a question for you, but for now I must go and count all my stuff.

George Carlin did a funny bit about "stuff".

As Bluie mentions, the problem of what consitutes a species of techology is unsolved and a hinderance. In biology subtle changes in form are disregarded if two organisms can breed, and similar forms are disregarded if two organisms can't breed. My rough take is two things are the same if the specific steps (make this shape from this material) to manufacture them are equivalent. So most screws are the same species, while most laptop computers are not.

You should check out a book called "System of Objects" by Jean Baudrilliard. It gets into some pretty nifty classifications systems for everyday things. It used to be available from Verso press.

I find it an interesting comment on biology and psychology that human's natural instinct is to collect. While there have been a number of comments from folks who aspire to do more with less, or organize and manage the objects in our lives, this all implies a continuous battle against our (I would argue) natural, biological tendancy to collect items. I suspect the evolutionary processes that have allowed our societies to develop and grow are the same ones we feel are inherently unstable and unsuitable to provide sustained growth for our "evolutional progress". It is interesting that we have now seem to have a cognative (inherently un-biological) battle to indirectly manage our biological tendancies. Of course, isn't this what the human experience is ultimately about though?

Is success of our species ultimately tied to our abilities to manage, transcend, or evolve those evolutional factors that have made us biologically successful in the first place?

No idea what prompted me to look at your Help Wanted sure glad tho. This whole section is fascinating. Even the philosophical ramblins.

The thought of counting every object is totally mind boggling. The county tax assesor required an inventory of the "Personal Property" used in my small (one person) business. That provided a staggering count. They even wanted to know how many paperclips, of each style. I have to admit to estimating.

You have your generic paperclip. They come in sizes but that would not be a separate species. Plastic coated in colors would be a subspecies? OK let's not count color and size.

Then there are triangular plastic paper clips. OK that is a separate species.

Metal double triangluar ones.

Little metal ones with prongs to grip the paper.

Now the paper "clips" above do not really "clip" to things.

OK Bull Dog clips would be a separate species or maybe even a separate family? Genus? Whatever.

Just how detailed a breakdown are you aiming at? How much of a change makes the items separate species?

Someone mentioned counting dining flatware as one object. But there are forks and then there are forks, salad forks, dinner forks, dessert forks, escargot forks, etc. Then there are formal dinner sets, everyday use sets, picnic or camping sets. Mine would be easy to count just a mixed bunch of thirft shop utensils used for transfering food to mouth.

I am getting tired just thinking about it. And I live alone in a 32' foot camp trailer! Would you want the items in storage included? Hah!

PTB help you if someone from say Lake Tahoe with an 20 room house responds. Probably crash your server!!

Jeremy, thanks for the suggestion of the patent taxonomy. And thanks to those who have volunteered their object count.

Hi Kevin,

Have you considered using the classification systems put in place in the world's patent offices as a way of quantifying technology types. Patents are routinely classified and sub-classified according to technology type. Most of the world uses a harmonised system.

I don't know to what extent it would fit into your remit but there is a wealth of data to be had by researching on the patent office web-sites. For example, the way in which technological goals have changed over the last couple of centuries.

Hey -- first time here, and I see a reference to one of my favorite books in the comments. Cool :-)

I would be happy to be a data point and tally the objects in my world, Kevin -- I have the time & motivation to do that just now. Please send instructions.

Hi Kevin,

You mentioned that you wanted to know what technology wants, but there seems to be no specific place to post an answer. This forum appears to be the closest approach.

Can I recommend Susan Blackmore's extremely interesting and thought-provoking book "The Meme Machine? In it, she proposes that technology (specifically information technology) 'wants' the same thing as language: simply to spread, because that's what replicators do, and information is just a replicator for us humans. Just as DNA has shaped us, the better to spread itself, memetic information has shaped our brains, the better to spread itself, and hugely swollen our crania, made us jabber non-stop and blog and who knows what else.

IMHO, memetics is the closest that science has come to understanding why we are so different to other animals. Instead of only one, we have two replicators moulding us, simply because we can copy and imitate.

I hope you read this book. I found it about as view-changing as 'Out Of Control' myself!

Cheers,

Chris

I'd like to see your guidelines, and perhaps contribute to your study. Besides helping with an interesting project, I suspect it will be an enlightening endeavor to "discover" the taxonomy of objects in my life.

How do you report composite objects? As a cyclist, I think of a bicycle as a collection of objects combined into a whole, but not being much of a mechanic, a car is simply, well, one big object for driving.

hey Kevin,

ah, this minds me of this one book which I've forgotten the name of. it's a book of objects that were never invented. we can only look at them and say, ah if such things diid exist, the way in which this world related to each other would be so much different..

I'd say Kevin, you HAVE to get this book. So many objects that have been invented so far could have gone so differently. it's a very enlightening experience to imagine any random object in this world and imagine if it didn't exist or if it had be done differently..

how can we take technology and open back up lost experiences, ones that are no longer possible. species that have disappeared or be hidden from view by the introduction of new ones..

i can't find the title of this book but I know where to find it. A sample page was in the french textbooks that the Alliance Francaise uses. I've been wanting to re-find it for years. I'll try sometime. All I need to do is visit the AF and look flip through their text books for 5 minutes or so.
workbooks for the textbooks I'm sure. And i'm positive it was 2nd year.

820 items. That's how many individual objects we have in our home sans duplicate items such as silverware, which I've counted as a single object. While I haven't sorted them by "species", I have sorted them by reason for keeping, mostly to facilitate sorting which things to keep with us for our three-month sabbatical to Iceland and which to ship to us when we move from Iceland to N.Y. (short-term storage).

By profession I'm an organizer, and in this capacity I've become fascinated by how and what things people keep in their lives. I've also recently (three years ago) married, and my husband and I have embarked on an experiment in minimizing the things in our lives. After living in no place for longer than seven months for 7 years or so these last three years in the states have been a real chance to try "settling" and to learn about all the crap a two-person household can accumulate. With that in mind we're recently gone through and categorized all our stuff and only kept things we love and get plenty of use out of. Out of 820 items we're giving away 400 to friends and family. Out of the 420 remaining items we're storing 200 items short term (until we move to NYC), storing 20 items long term (such as fiscal records, etc.) and bringing 200 items with us to Iceland. The 200 items we're bringing should fit into 4 suitcases.

Let me know if your interested in more info on this; for example, I could send you the spreadsheet I put together. Once I get to Iceland I'll put up a website with a bunch of pictures and results from the move. I'll do some studies on what we have missed and what we forgot we ever had out of the stuff we stored back in the states. Also, I have put together a list of things to acquire for NYC and I'm interested to see how realistic it is. We don't plan to add a lot of stuff ones we move there, but I've been consistently amazed to see what turns out to be important - such as a tea kettle, for example.

Just as an aside, here's a link to Andrea Zittel's website - she's an artist that has done a lot of interesting studies on the stuff in our life. She's make a mock company called A-Z design an institute of investigative living.
http://www.zittel.org/

I'm glad somebody is thinking about this.
Thanks,

Hulda

No waxing objective here. This work has already been accomplished via a massive global effort. Order, Genus, and Species, nice and neat:

http://listings.ebay.com/pool1/listings/list/overview.html

I particularly like:

http://listings.ebay.com/listings/list/all/category99/overview.html?from=R13

So what manufacturing company do you know? Call one of them and find out who they call to get their UPC code.

Funny thing is, there doesn't seem to be any UPC people. It's more of a cooperative, witih little at its center, so finding someone to ask hasn't worked out.

If anyone knows anyone who has access to the UPC data, I'd like a reference, thanks.

With the transition from natural to object, those UPC codes are finding their way into the product rather than just attached to the product. They are moving themselves from the surface of the object and becoming as close to a part of the object as they can.

Technology has been a long series of constraint removal or relaxation. The primary enabler is the movement of the metadata link anchor towards the thing itself. Adjacency is the best that digital will ever achieve. Even being injected is just a way to package the tag. The tag will not become intrinsic.

Computing has backed off on its search for enough intelligence to be intrinsic, so what is the goal of technology? I'd say adjacency, and a relationship built on multiplying human potential, instead of replacing humans. They assist us in a world where a task allocation process uses humans as the recognitional unit, and computing as the computational unit. The tag is a far reaching component in that scheme as it preserves recognition and extends it. UPC lables are just recognitional technology.

---

The UPC people could vary easily give you the entire taxonomy of the object classes you are seeking.

Patrick,

I had not heard of Landy's work, but it's beautiful. Eactly what I was looking for. I just ordered the book from Amazon UK.

I'd love to know where you got this quote:
"modern western man owns an average of 25.000 objects. This in great contrast to the small amount of 350 objects primitive man needed to survive."

While I believe in the 350, I find the 25,000 for moderns to be unreasonable based on my own home's count, and Landy's. If that was switch to "use" or "encounter" versus "owns" I would find it more plausible.

But I could be wrong. Can you recall where you might have picked it up?

Dear Kelly,

Last december I gave a lecture in India at a conference on Eco Design. The question I was trying to answer was whether "the experience economy would lead to a more sustainable society".

One of the artists I mentioned during the lecture is Michael Landy. He got famous in the spring of 2001 by categorising all of his belongings, being 7.006 objects. It took 2 weeks to classify everything, from postcards, to his car, from chairs to the coat his father had once given him.

His project is named "Break down" and that is exactly what he did: all of his possesions where demolished, taken apart and recycled. All that is left of his act is a book. In it you'll find photographs, tables and other forms of information.

Another quote I used for the lecture is the fact that modern western man owns an average of 25.000 objects. This in great contrast to the small amount of 350 objects primitive man needed to survive. I can't remember where I read this but i'm convinced it's true. With this you could estimate the amount of objects people in the west possess.

One of the products I designed has been purchased by the museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Holland. Recently they presented a new service. All works in their collection (being around 400.000 objects) have been digitized. Visitors can search through this database by name, material, kind of artpiece, name of the artist, et cetera. It might be of interest to find out what kind of software they have used and also what kind of classification system.

Yesterday I removed 15 pieces of cloth and another 20 useless objects from my house. They had been stored in the attic for at least a year, without me using them.

I realised they had been waiting for a new life, in someone elses hands.

There are too many objects like these in this world and I'm convinced people should learn how to do more, using less.

My lecture ended with a concept that stimulates playfull man. This Homo Ludens does not consume like a madman but is far more interested in getting access to sustainable experiences.

Landy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/news_comment/artistsinprofile/landy.shtml

Museum: http://www.boijmans.nl

"Follow out intuition..."

Amen to that.

Kevin - Thank you - I enjoy writing - I contributed that meditation - rumination? - on the proliferation of objects because I thoroughly enjoy Wired, and so am gratefull to you for it's creation.

As another note, there is the corresponding decline in what the Harvard Ethnobotanist Wade Davis has termed the "Ethnosphere". Davis has started a movement to try and preserve some of the knowledge of the Ethnosphere which represents, really, hundreds of thousands of years of human symbiotic (only partial, yes) cultural co-evolution with the Earth's biota.

These are fields of knowledge which are usually only dimly understood: fantastically rich knowledge of the uses of plants, and shamanistic practices embedded in complex comsmologies, some of which make current monotheistic religions look primitive.

However, as for the larger themes of my essay - where this all is going is far from clear and I prefer to contemplate it in terms of simultaneous, mutually contradictory explanatory schemes, of many different "narratives".

Sure, I am inclined to give more weight to the scientific narrative - it's testable - except.........to paraphrase St. Augustine, the miraculous is that which science does not yet understand. So: the work of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab. is astounding enough........measureable PSI (?!!)

Our brains are too small, to fully grasp where that (above) is heading, I think, but we must try. I suspect that hunches, intuition are really fantastically complex probabilistic calculations (others have said this on far more authority) and so, I guess we must follow our intuition.

I do wonder about Lame Deer's "Lost language of the Heart, of the spirit, of dreams"......

On optimism: Yes, I would agree, because (at the very least) hope -an activist hope- is the best and most practical way.....but in a world of terrible trends, of inexplicable phenomenon, of the onrushing power of technological amplification, of the human impact on the biosphere, of impending AI and all the Transhumanist yearnings.....whither?

Gather silkweed pods in the field. Pull them gently open, scattering the seeds to float away as their silky wings catch the wind. Follow.

What a wonderful essay, Bruce. I think you are right that our environment has shifted from one largely living to one largely of objects. I may be more optimistic in what it means, but the shift is real nonetheless.

By the way, I wrote that to express the feeling I have that it would be highly impractical for me to count all of my (nonliving) objects, given that there could easily be hundreds of thousands - and that I am actually inclined to view the profusion of objects in my life as symptomatic of a disorder which charactorizes both my life (absurdly so) and also larger industrial society.

A taxonomy could be interesting. But for the moment - it's been raining here for so long and the sun just came out.....and the dog has been waiting so patiently.

How many objects?

Interesting question......perhaps this question serves as a proxy for a number of personality charactoristics.

1) Mobility - although one can, of course, have "cached" objects at static locations.

2) Life/"nonlife" focus (more on this below) - Interaction with objects vs. interaction with humans and other living beings.

3) Interior/exterior focus - Living in one's created, self-controlled enverinoment vs. interaction with an uncontrolled, dynamical and far more interactive reality (also more on this below).

4) Range of interest - more interests = a tendency towards more categories, more accumulated objects.

Also on the question itself: To catalogue each discrete object I own would take months, or more - this is not all that unusual among Americans or other industrialized peoples.

When do the objects become too many?

As I thought about it, the question flowed towards that larger current of questions troubling humanity as we face the new millenium:

Think of this. Among that tiny extant remnant of hunting and gathering peoples, it would be more common to own a few dozen, or less, objects. The implications of this fact are stark.

Regardless of one's cultural heritage - as an urban dweller in Tokyo or a hunter-gatherer in the deeper recesses of the shrinking, beseiged jungles of Borneo, the objects in one's mental constellation are always practically infinite.

"Objects", owned or not, are created in a sense by perception itself ( the brain's construction of 'objects' from raw sensory data ) and, as such, are practically limitless. Reducing this infinite universe of objects to a more manageable constellation is a dilemna and a challenge.

Think of Buddhism's "Ten Thousand Things" always clamouring for attention.

The developing human infant contructs - at the time of it's maximal brain growth rate growth rate after birth, of thousands of brain cells per second - the underpinnings of it's mental maps of reality - of these objects, the surrounding living beings, and the presented ways of being (as exemplied and modelled by caregivers).

This mental representation relentlessly grows, accretes through the course of life (leading to the perceived acceleration in the rate of time as one ages). In a sense - as one ages - one lives more and more in and perceives more and more through those mental maps. One increasingly "lives in one's head".

What does the infant map? 'Objects' - to the developing infant in the modern industrial world - tend to be just that. Static. I could expand on the word, and I might choose to call those objects "objects within an artificially (humanly) constructed realm" - an apartment or a house.)

Because...

Living beings in the infants developing perceptual realm? ........these are far and few between. Parents and sometimes (outside of much of Northen European and US culture) relatives and friends - if the infant is lucky. Perhaps another child or two, perhaps not. And nonhuman life? What of the millions (and probably more) of existing species on Earth - what stands in as representatives for this immense teeming bulk of life?

A dog, a cat, a fish maybe. A bug or two (but probably not).

Contrast this sketch of mine - really quite dismal if you think about it - with the fantastic profusion of life and social interaction which would have surrounded and embraced the developing infant of the average preindustrial hunting and gathering society: life everywhere. Humans, a lot of them, and always close by - siblings, parents, relatives, tribesmembers. And nonhuman life - eveywhere! - in all of it's astounding variety. Insects, plants, animals, birds, fish, more. The totality.

And more still: that culture, that language, that encoded mode of human cultural being developed over thousands, ten of thousands (or more) of years -- geared towards ( or I should say really twined around? ) the imperative of living in the natural world. Not completely, of course. Humans have long fashioned tools and, to an extent, artificial worlds. Birds do this too.

But, eventually, a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

I don't think I need to belabour the point: we 'moderns' now develop mental maps not of living things, and not of cultural modes of interacting with non-human life. We navigate through and interact with, primarily, humanly constructed worlds - cities, suburbs, homes - far more poor in life's diversity than the most barren desert. And then, of course, we interact with others of our extended tribe, the tribe Homo Sapiens Sapiens, Man the doubly wise.

Meanwhile, as we humans gaze at our many objects and chatter with others of our tribe inside these wobbly kingdoms of human artifice, the fabric of Earth's overall biosphere, Gaia if you will, frays and even tears in places. The foundations crack and shift.

Is our inability to shift our gaze from the objects to the dense - but retreating - tangle of life outside our door an outgrowth of an innate, Gaian self regulatory mechanism - as Reg Morrison suggests - which dooms us as a species?

Or is it merely an artifact, a by-product of industrialism?

Will we manage to shift our gaze and learn - with our somewhat hardened but still somewhat plastic brains - the forgotton language of life, of our dreams and our deeper beings (to paraphrase the Lakota Shaman, Lame Deer) and our relation to life's wider realm which is the matrix our our existence? Will we learn to come to terms with ourselves -as biological beings living in a larger biological system?

Will we retreat into humanly constructed biospheres, as Dorion Sagan speculates, while the larger biosphere - "Biosphere One" - crumbles?

Will we learn to dispense with corporeality altogether and escape the Earth itself, to burst out of these confines in a great singular explosion?....and then what will "we" be?

If indeed we are now a transitional form, what will we be? - And, having laid waste to our place of origin, will other life forms we might encounter welcome us? Or will we be to them a ravening swarm, the locust plague?

To be continued.

QRS, which I didn't know about, seems very promising. Thanks. Just to clarify what I am looking for: Not a census of artifacts -- like who many electric blankets have been sold, or exist, but how many types of electric blankets, or even blankets in general. Think of blankets as an order, electric blankets as the genus, and the varieties of electric blankets as the species. So how many species of things that we make are there?

Oh, okay -- I get it. I thought you were looking for a taxonomy, not a survey of individual items. The taxonomy will provide you with groups and subgroups -- say Teakettles > Electric, but won't tell you how many companies manufacture teakettles or how many kettles have been disseminated. And there is no central registry of the individual items that I am aware of (it would be phenomenally big, for one thing.

That is a tough problem! Let me think about it some more.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two possibilities:
1. QRS (Quick Response Systems). You know how when you get something scanned at the supermarket or a bigbox retailer, and the name of the item comes up on a little display? It would be a lot of work if every retailer had to type in every description associated with every UPC (or even take feeds from every supplier as stock changed). QRS has a database of product descriptions tied to UPC codes that they sell to retailers. Obviously this has some limitations -- it won't take into account the fact that the "built environment" contains plenty of old or obsolete products, for example But it would probably give a good snapshot of what's on offer here in the US. One thing the QRS database will not contain is how many units of each item have sold (QRS has no way of knowing).

QRS's stuff is not in the public domain, but I find asking nicely does wonders. Most people work all day at jobs absolutely no one has any interest in hearing about, and having someone call with sincere interest about what they do all day is like finding water in the desert.

2. Estimation approach. I think it would be possible to estimate the aggregate quantity of items by combining publically available data on production and sales with a given product taxonomy. Obviously this is a top-down approach, and it would be fiendishly difficult to make it at all granular. It might be worth it to do some math, however, simply to get a good idea of what a logical "envelope" for the amount of commercial "stuff" there is in the world. Sometimes it is good to get a sense, say, of how many boxcars would it take to haul a billion bottlecaps. This process would be good for that kind of knowledge (although I suspect that's not what you're after). But a combo of information about the variety of individual items and some thoughtful math that combines this info with more general data about production may turn up some novel insights.

I have looked at John Freyer's project. It's a data point that I am using.

Likewise, photographer Peter Menzel's "Material World" which was a global effort to photograph families around the world standing outside their dwelling with all their possessions. I haven't asked Peter if he counted them all, but I suppose I could count the items seen in the images.

Lisa, I've toyed with using UPC codes as a way to measure diversity. But on our first pass, we didn't come up with any tallies -- the actual codes, unlike the categories -- are generated by individual companies, so these aren't in the public domain. At least I haven't been able to find out where they are centralized.

What about UN-SPSC? You know UPC codes, the numbers on top of the barcodes? They're not randomly generated -- they're part of a lovingly managed, pruned, and trimmed taxonomy. UN-SPSC is actually a project of the United Nations to create a standard product taxonomy that developing countries can use to make (largely electronic) catalogs of goods from local craftsmen, manufacturers, tradesmen, farmers, etc. that is easily digestible by the computers of First World corporations.

There are other taxonomies, too. I used to do some research on them because I had clients who were making large databases of products, and had to be able to generate an electronic catalog or inventory mangement database quickly for many different kinds of businesses -- from a coffee importer, to, say, Cisco. It's a fascinating and little known corner of the standards universe.

I believe National Geographic published a photo essay (in late '80s or early-mid '90s) containing pictures of families from different countries with all their household belongings on display.

Also, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "The Meaning of Things : Domestic Symbols and the Self" might help too.

Perhaps you'd be interested in John Freyer's project "All my life for sale," or could at least glean something from this page: http://www.allmylifeforsale.com/html/allitems.html