Standards (MIT Press Essential Knowledge)

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.

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.