Hostile Objects: The Stories Designers Tell

Every designed object projects a story, according to Bruce Sterling. In this short documentary he "reads" three objects — a payphone, a music player, and the CERN particle accelerator — and rants about the inhumanity of the stories they tell.

Interviewee: Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author who co-invented (with William Gibson et al.) the cyberpunk genre — of which he's considered "ideological father" — and instigated the Dead Media Project and the Viridian Design Movement.

2007

About These Documentaries

Upland created 20 short documentaries about topics in science, design, technology, and their intersections.

For each, we started by doing careful research and planning so that we could in most cases do all the interviewing and filming in a single day and edit to final cut within a week.

Most were funded in part by Technology Review and shown on the magazine's website alongside articles on the same topic. We selected topics with its editor-in-chief, but then did the rest of the work completely independently.

A few were funded in part by Children's Hospital Boston and used to raise funds for the hospital's medical research.