A Blobject is a term coined by either designer / author, Steven Skov Holt or designer, Karim Rashid. Its origin is still currently debated. The more popular theory is that the word is a contraction or portmanteau of "blobby" and "object" coined by design critic and educator Steven Skov Holt in the early 1990s. Author and design journalist Phil Patton attributed the word to Holt in 1993 in Esquire magazine.

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  • A Blobject is a term coined by either designer / author, Steven Skov Holt or designer, Karim Rashid. Its origin is still currently debated. The more popular theory is that the word is a contraction or portmanteau of "blobby" and "object" coined by design critic and educator Steven Skov Holt in the early 1990s. Author and design journalist Phil Patton attributed the word to Holt in 1993 in Esquire magazine. According to Steven Skov Holt, a blobject is most often a colorful, mass-produced, plastic-based, emotionally engaging consumer product with a curvilinear, flowing shape. This fluid and curvaceous form is the blobject's most distinctive feature. Blobjects can also be found in all of the other areas of contemporary visual culture. A blobject can be a typographic font, an animation (cf. Monica Peon), a piece of furniture, an article of clothing, a motorcycle (GK Dynasmics), a car (GEMCAR), a building, a painting, a piece of sculpture (Hadeki Matsumoto), or ceramics work (Ken Price). Blobjects can be made of any material in any size or scale for the home, office, car, or outdoors. Common materials used in fabricating blobjects are plastic, metal, and rubber, with the aim being to give a more organic and animate feel. Karim Rashid, the contemporary designer who wrote the book I want to Change the World, was an early leader in creating blobjects and has become one of the most celebrated designers of the new generation. In the past, form followed function so that a product always tended to look like what was inside it, but that is no longer always true. Advances in computer-aided design, information visualization, rapid prototyping, materials, and injection molding have given designers the chance to use new shapes and to explore transparency and translucency without significant extra production costs. More recently, in 2004, author Bruce Sterling used the word in the title of his keynote speech at Siggraph. In his speech titled, "When Blobjects Rule the Earth", Sterling speculated on the future of graphic simulation when practical differences no longer exist between computer generated models and physically manufactured objects.
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  • A Blobject is a term coined by either designer / author, Steven Skov Holt or designer, Karim Rashid. Its origin is still currently debated. The more popular theory is that the word is a contraction or portmanteau of "blobby" and "object" coined by design critic and educator Steven Skov Holt in the early 1990s. Author and design journalist Phil Patton attributed the word to Holt in 1993 in Esquire magazine.
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  • Blobject
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