An engaging introduction to standards, the invisible infrastructure that shapes the built and digital environments of the modern world.


Standards are the DNA of the built environment, encoded in nearly all objects that surround us in the modern world. In Standards, Jeffrey Pomerantz and Jason Griffey provide an essential introduction to this invisible but critical form of infrastructure—the rules and specifications that govern so many elements of the physical and digital environments, from the color of school buses to the shape of shipping containers.

In an approachable, often outright funny fashion, Pomerantz and Griffey explore the nature, function, and effect of standards in everyday life. Using examples of specific standards and contexts in which they are applied—in the realms of technology, economics, sociology, and information science—they illustrate how standards influence the development and scope, and indeed the very range of possibilities of our built and social worlds. Deeply informed and informally written, their work makes a subject generally deemed boring, complex, and fundamentally important comprehensible, clear, and downright engaging.


Series Overview: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers accessible, concise, beautifully produced books on topics of current interest. Written by leading thinkers, the books in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects that range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific and the technical. In today’s era of instant information gratification, we have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need. Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access to complex ideas.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Jeffrey Pomerantz, co-founder of the educational technology company Proximal Design Labs and former professor of Library and Information Science, is the author of Metadata, also in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.
Jason Griffey, Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, has been a professor and academic librarian at the University of TN at Chattanooga, a technology consultant, and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.


Author Residence: Newton, MA (Pomerantz); Sewanee, TN (Griffey)

Author Hometown: Boston, MA (Pomerantz); Olive Hill, KY (Griffey)