Blobject

I encountered this word in Bruce Sterling's Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002). He ascribes the term's coinage to Karim Rashid (see his I Want to Change the World via amazon.com --not loved by many of its reviewers...). 'Blobject' made it into the American Dialect Society's Words of the Year for 2002 (in the 'Most Creative' category, with 'dot bomb', 'dot snot', and 'megawatt laundering').

Some Sterling instantiations:

Blobjects & Biodesign (Bruce Sterling)

Viridian note (2001), cf Eco-furniture from the same site

All About Gadgets and Gizmosity By Bruce Sterling, Peter Lewis, February 2001 Issue Fortune

Design and Deep Environmentalism (Bruce Sterling at the Metropolis Conference, 2001)

Junk DNA (Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, Asimov's Science Fiction)

Extempore Remarks (Mark Dery)

As the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling put it, in a piece of e-mail to a friend, ‘It’s all about goo now. Cloned sheep. Embryo stem cells. Tailored viruses that kill cancers. Growth hormones. Mutant houseplants that grow in the dark. Mice with human ears growing out of their backs.’

Even the design sensibility of the early ‘00s reflects our technological movement away from hard, dry robotics, toward squishy, slimy genetics: the shelves of stores like Target abound in translucent, biomorphic tools and toys whose amoebic aesthetic designers have dubbed the ‘blobject.’ We live in weird times, when technology means spliced genes, not buckets of bolts. We stand on the eve of what the fringe SF writer Paul Di Filippo calls the age of ‘ribofunk’ in his novel of the same name: customized children, cloned pets, salmon reprogrammed to grow at accelerated speed, potatoes that glow when the soil’s too dry (thanks to transplanted jellyfish genes), gene therapy that may one day engineer hemophilia out of existence, mighty morphin epidemiological mutations (badder by far than Ebola Classic), and the rising specter of eugenics.

It’s a post-, post-, postmodern world, dominated more and more by genomics, and any artist who wants to acquire target on the fast-moving zeitgeist is going to have to contend with that fact.

(see also Mark Dery's Future imperfect: Robots evoke fears and inspire dreams along the cultural dividing line from Red Herring [2000]).

Not sure how to fit these in: ACTUALISM AND BLOB'S TIMELY ASPECTS OR METAPHORS (Matjaž Potrè) and BLOBJECTIVIST MONISM and Ontomorph: Mind Meets The World