[23] Steven Hamilton Holt was born in 1957 in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Canton, CT.[23][24] After high school, he worked as a busboy and attended Boston Architectural College before enrolling at Brown University after receiving financial aid.

[29][25] After Stanford, he worked at the global design consultancy frogdesign from 1992 to 2000, serving in capacities including "visionary," strategist, vice-president of creative culture and general manager.

[2][7][6] In a Wired review, Suzanne Wu wrote, "Blobjects avoids art book snobbishness by focusing its ivory tower analysis on the sensual side of everyday products … [Holt and Skov] make a compelling case for curvaceous design as a manifestation of our desires.

[21][10][39] Holt and Skov coined the term to describe processes—often painstaking handcrafting techniques of cutting, stacking, tying, folding, stitching or molding—that alter or fragment (physically and contextually) banal, mass-produced goods, transforming them into artworks.

[4][50][51] The exhibition marked a boundary-blurring, digital-era design shift away from "the ubiquitous 'black box' of minimalism"[8] and toward human, tactile and emotional work reflecting entertainment culture and the growing visual literacy of consumers.

... [Its] organizers create a credible mythology for design today: protean, expansive, filled with deep reserves of historical meaning, an art that leaves no area of consciousness unexplored.

[6][1] The former surveyed a new, technology-influenced fluidity across design categories and products, presenting amorphic, organic, curvy and protoplasmic forms ranging from the iMac G3 to Marc Newson's Lockheed Lounge and "cutensils" to a Smart Car.

[6][20][26] "Manufractured" gathered the work of an International group of artists who appropriated abundant, off-the-shelf manufactured or recycled products and packaging as raw materials, among them Harriete Estel Berman, Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym and Sonya Clark.

[40][39] The Christian Science Monitor characterized the show as "a compelling case for a new movement" of "eloquent and unexpected art"[10] whose time-honored artmaking strategies of craft, process, repetition and variation commented on consumerism and the culture at large.

[55][27][35] In 1992, he joined the Silicon Valley office of the global firm frogdesign with the title of "visionary"; he also served as director of strategy, vice-president of creative culture and general manager until leaving in 2000 for health reasons.