---

A unique exploration of the design, material history and hidden lives of an object that is central to the development of our consumer society.

---

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there, clanking on the docks just out of sight.. 90% of the goods and materials that move around the globe do so in shipping containers. It is an absolutely ubiquitous object, even if most of us have no direct contact with it. But what is this thing? Where has it been, and where is it going? Craig Martin´s book illuminates the "development of containerization"-including design history, standardization, aesthetics, and a surprising speculative discussion of the futurity of shipping containers.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

---

1. Introduction: Packaging Stuff
2. 20 x 40 x 8 feet: Design and Development of a Global Object
3. Twist Lock: Global Object of Capitalism
4. Breaking the Seal: Illicit Lives of the Container
5. Four Walls: Container Afterlives:
6. Conclusion: Global Object to Come
Index

---

Craig Martin has brought real love and insight to the logistical life of the shipping container. He reveals its role in the distributive space of extensive global networks and other dark places and their knotty politics, without ever losing track of our personal attachment and alienation to this box of ubiquity, this vessel of choreographed capitalism. Shipping Container is an efficient little package, calculating, brisk, economical, and yet, it is anything but a standardized account; it just sings. Peter Adey, Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

---

Craig Martin is Senior Lecturer in Design Cultures at The University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the co-editor, with J. Rugg, of Spatialities: The Geographies of Art & Architecture (Intellect Books, 2011).

Craig Martin is Senior Lecturer in Design Cultures at The University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the co-editor, with J. Rugg, of Spatialities: The Geographies of Art & Architecture (2011).

---