It’s never easy to use the floor to communicate information in an exhibit, no matter what kind of glass floor, LED grid or temporary decals you try. First of all, things wear out when people step on them all day. But more importantly, if the exhibit is popular, the visitors themselves block the view.
This memorable floor tile installation, from the newly-opened Schindler’s Factory in Krakow, Poland (a branch of the Historical Museum there) works for several reasons:
it deliberately puts a offensive symbol underfoot so visitors can trample it
it uses a simple but powerful repeating pattern over the whole floor
visitors may not notice it right away: even better
cost of ownership: nearly zero, it is as low-tech as it gets
Frighteningly elegant. Read more in the New York Times. See a short video tour of the museum shortly before opening here.
Goooal! Three of the winning entries just announced in this year’s IDEA design awards were exhibit design projects. The judges might have had a case of World Cup fever: one of the projects hails from Brazil, the Museu do Futebol (The Soccer Museum); credited to designers Jair de Souza of Jair de Souza Design; Daniela Thomas and Felipe Tassara; and Mauro Munhoz and Leonel Kaz:
A great, simple video of what everyone involved in interactive installation projects knows, but sometimes can’t articulate. By the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, led by Australia-born conceptual artist Natalie Jeremijenko. Don’t let the name confuse you, it is a provocative design studio camouflaged as a university health think-tank, also apparently sometimes called the “x Design Project”. You figure out the rest.
Liberally excerpted from the Vimeo blurb (see here for more of the blurb, which is great, and more videos, which are also great):
This video illustrates that if you hold constant the institutional context (in this case a contemporary museum), and the information presented (in this case the curatorial information); and you only vary the technological interface, you can reveal the Structures of Participation around the differing interfaces—same info, same context, but very different experience. Because of the tight coupling, it can be very difficult to make sense of what is actually changing as we change our socio-technical system. In the first case (a) the traditional public display of text on museum wall, which, because of the social convention of quiet-while-some-one-is-reading, you can be standing next to someone, but not talk to them and never hear anything of what they are thinking. Secondly, the technological shift we have all witnessed in contemporary museums as the curatorial information is presented as an audio tour, as a privatized audio environment via headset (or similar). This has the effect of synchronizing people temporally, but precludes local discussion–you can’t hear what anyone nearby is saying. In the third case the curatorial information is presented via a deliberately triggered (pull) small located speaker (the Located Sound Speaker or LSSn). This creates a shared audio context for a small group, momentarily synchronizing people spatially and temporally, and providing an opportunity for local comments and discussion.
More on the exploits of Ms. Jeremijenko in this article and YouTube video from GOOD Magazine.
In case you missed it, Robin Pogrebin’s Brooklyn Museum article in the New York Times yesterday (“Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds”), has created quite a stir. The article itself is very much worth reading, if you are someone interested in successful visitor experiences of whatever kind. Just don’t expect pat answers, the jury is still out. Perhaps indefinitely.
One of the better responses I’ve seen thus far has been from the most mysterious, anonymous, hardworking museum twitterer around, @museumnerd, who posted this reply.
Why do I like the “obscure Brooklyn depot” or “fascinating gallery of extraordinary objects and materials” called The Index Ltd so much? First, I can’t explain what it is very well, which usually portends great things. Second, the online version has a Swiss domain extension for reasons initially mysterious.
But don’t just take my word for it. From Cool Hunting:
Tucked away on an anonymous street in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, the storefront and gallery The Index Ltd is almost as rare a find as the objects it harbors. The space—home to the work of Jonathan Roquemaure—represents the culmination of his healthy obsession with sourcing and documenting materials and objects that have singularly fascinating purposes, characters and origins.
Starting today you can get a key to unlock NYC’s secret doors; at least all the interesting ones. Creative Time and the City of New York have collaborated with artist Paul Ramirez Jonas and created this summer’s coolest scavenger hunt. With Key to the City they have reinvented and democratized the civic honor of bestowing keys to visiting dignitaries. … Ramirez Jonas’ Key to the City actually unlocks steel gates, padlocks, PO boxes, secret doors and secret compartments at over 20 sites throughout the five boroughs of NYC. The key will unlock:
– A secret door on the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum
- A box with limited admission buttons per day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- A do-it-yourself artist studio and gallery in the Point Community Development Corporation in the Bronx
- The churchyard that contains Hamilton’s tomb at Trinity Church
- A box at coat check with a preview of the Whitney Museum’s future
- A room in the Louis Armstrong House Museum not on the public tour
- A closet in the master bedroom on the 2nd floor of Gracie Mansion
- A garden maintained by the monks at the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara
Are you as sick of your mouse as I am? Ever wonder why everyone in a two-handed species uses a one-handed interface? Via Swissmiss, the inventor of that Minority Report gesture-based computer interface demonstrates it in real time on the TED stage. “In five years, when you buy a computer, you will get this.” Brilliant.
(I’ll fix the weird cropping in a minute, but don’t worry, it’s all there.)
A happy coincidence: I was at the Miami Art Museum two weeks ago – just a few days after I wrote about the Saraceno installation image that was haunting me – and I stumbled on (and nearly into) Tomás Saraceno’s fantastic “Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spiders Web” (2008, elastic rope). How terrific: visitors who are “feeling flexible today,” as a guard put it, are encouraged to remove their shoes and attempt to make their way carefully between the strands if they like.
“Like Catherine Zeta-Jones in that movie with Sean Connery?” I asked. “Um, sure,” said the guard.
I do think about other things besides the Cooper-Hewitt. I just don’t blog about them, apparently. The Cooper-Hewitt’s recently-opened Triennial exhibit, “Why Design Now?” has me, well, thinking. My favorite project thus far, for a dozen reasons: the “Posterwall for the 21st Century” installation at the Graphic Design Museum in the Netherlands.
Created by design group Lust, the wall falls towards the end of the exhibit “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design”. It is a large-scale, digital media display of overlapping minimal posters. But none of these posters were designed by a human. They are designed automatically, one every five minutes, by software drawing on “various internet sources”.
You’ll find footage of it starting at the 3:30 mark of the video above (but watch the whole video while you’re at it, you’ll be glad you did). See the online version of the wall here, and see more images from the exhibit at the Graphic Design Museum here.
A lovely video from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (post from Director Bill Moggridge’s “Bill’s Blog” here) showing the way they got a (teensy) Tata Nano off New York City streets and onto a display platform inside the museum. Despite snow.
Designing exhibits, I’ve always been inspired as much by installation art as any other discipline. Perhaps more. For example, this remarkable image, from a piece by Argentine-German artist Tomás Saraceno, has been haunting me lately:
In the spring Bonniers Konsthall presents a solo exhibition by the artist and architect Tomás Saraceno … In collaboration with spider researchers and astrophysicists, Tomás Saraceno has spent several years developing the 400 cubic metre installation that is exhibited at Bonniers Konsthall. … The gigantic spider’s web, especially made for the main gallery of Bonniers Konsthall, consists of elastic black rope which will span floor to ceiling.
Must-see: an enlightening and (very) information-packed discussion of social media and web strategy. By Sebastian Chan – charismatic director of apparently everything technological at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia – speaking at the Smithsonian (archived at the Smithsonian 2.0 video collection)
I promise you my best 140 characters on accessibility, architecture, education, exhibit design, graphic design, installation art, interaction design, museums, online exhibits, philanthropy, technology, video, and wayfinding. www.twitter.com/jonathanalger
King Tut, or at least the exhibition of the same name, has come to Times Square. A recent review in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein explains that the show is raising money for Egyptian museums, and that doing so apparently means a more commercial focus than ever.
The New York show is hosted by “Discovery Times Square Exposition,” which is related to the Discovery Channel. (Discovery TSX, by the way, is promoted as “New York City’s first large-scale exhibition center.” No offense to Discovery – I am a fan of the TV programming – but I wonder what the large museums of the city, not to mention the Javits Center, must think of that particular claim.) The Metropolitan Museum, host of “Tut I”, the earlier show of years past that helped define the idea of a blockbuster exhibit, declined to host this time around.
The ticket price? $28. That’s a lot, even for a child king. An excerpt from the Times review after the break:
… an array of motor-assisted pendulums weaves through space emitting light and sound. The rhythm of the work evolves through chaos and returns to unison, producing a hypnotic and seductive performance that heightens the viewer’s awareness of the space and their relationship with it.
The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum's Triennial exhibit, Why Design Now?
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This site follows new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space. It is a personal project of Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the interdisciplinary design firm C&G Partners.
