In 1968 a quiet technological innovation was about to permanently and literally reshape the world. ISO 668 standardized shipping containers, transforming the shambolic logistics industry into a gigantic game somewhere between Tetris and Snake. These boxes are the vertebrae of today’s leviathan international markets.
One issue I’ve run into explaining protocols to people is that they pretty quickly begin to call everything a protocol. And that’s hard to correct, because any word can be conceptually stretched into fresh spaces.
Imagine if Tupperware wanted to make even better products or create an entirely new market. They’d commission a project called Summer of Containers (SoC) – a temporary research program that would create insights for Tupperware, based on a deeper understanding of the class of things—containers—that Tupperware belongs to.
You can understand many things as a container. Some are obvious: a bucket, a car trunk, a trash can, a cup, etc. Then you can go deeper: a cup is a container for coffee or beer; it’s also a container for energy and good times. You could also imagine a chair as a container. Or a book. Or an agenda for a meeting.
Pretty soon, everything around you looks like a container.
Obviously, not all of these things are primarily containers. A chair is better understood as a chair than as a container, but seeing it as a container can help you understand it better. Likewise, strangely, the designers at Tupperware can learn from how a chair acts as a container.
Once you have a bunch of examples and studies, then comes the hard work of boiling down what a container really is. Why do people need them? How do we make them? What’s the process for improving a container?
Ideally this could become a kind of science of Tupperware. There are likely too many degrees of freedom for a “grand unified theory” but containers do have important mathematical principles in their design. For example, if you want to stack containers inside of each other they need to have at least a 3 degree taper. Otherwise they’ll vacuum-seal together.
But you don’t even need to get to that point of formal theory to have useful intuitions about container design. If you’re immersed in container studies long enough, and if you don’t get caught up in impressing your container-nerd peers, that could well translate to a great skill.
Containers are such a fundamental part of everyday life, from mayonnaise to macroeconomic currents, that even a small improvement in how you think about them could create some great benefits.
They’re the backbone of the meal prep economy, bootleg Lego kits, your dad’s garage, friendsgiving, global supply chains, and extraterrestrial networks of satellites (ever heard of a CubeSat?). Even if you don’t become a full-fledged container expert, acquiring a functional literacy is certainly enriching.
Containerwatching is like birdwatching, but more cerebral, less dorky, and you can do it anywhere.
This is kind of what it’s like to study protocols. Not many people do, but they’re the bottom 80% of the civilizational iceberg. If you enjoyed Marc Levinson’s The Box, you’d probably enjoy the Protocol Reader – a collection of essays on protocols.
I, for one, am excited for Summer of Containers. Maybe Winter of Containers might be more fitting.