Speaking of designing exhibits about design, here is a great short video by Walker Art Center about their current exhibition, Graphic Design: Now In Production. It features curator Ellen Lupton from the Cooper-Hewitt, design director Andrew Blauvelt from the Walker … and lots of installation imagery of the exhibit itself. Just in time, too: the show closes on January 22.
Reading Forms, a tumblr by Yotam Hadar, collects images of well-designed exhibits about graphic design. A must-see. (Above, an installation shot from the Yale 2006 Graphic Design MFA Thesis Exhibition.) Cheers, Yotam!
This gigantic, temporary (for obvious reasons) ice typography by Vancouver artist Nicole Dextras goes well with the onset of chilly weather here in New York.
Another one I wish I’d done: Italian architect Werner Tscholl has created yet another lookout / observation deck / museum high in the mountains (here is the last one). This one, called Granat and overlooking the town of Moos, Italy, has two parts linked by a wooden bridge: one is a precipitous cage that glows at night, the other a gravity-defying, windowless exhibit gallery. Spectacular.
Speaking of virtual museums, “Road Inc.” is a new iPad app from Pyrolia in France. One reviewer has apparently said “Road Inc. is the closest thing you’ll find to a dynamic museum exhibition [in an iPad, I assume] and some of the best proof that there is life beyond coffee table books.” I’ve heard similar claims before, so I wasn’t optimistic. But this time, there may be cause for optimism.
I paid $4.99, downloaded it, and went through a few cars. (As their blurb says: “The first digital object dedicated to the automobile, Road Inc. comes with 50 iconic models to unveil.”) It comes with a Ferrari “exhibit” preloaded. The rest require individual waits for downloads, but they don’t take long, and otherwise that first download would take most of the day.
This frankly gorgeous app is utterly packed with interesting content of all kinds, from original studio photography to historic schematics to essays. And it’s full of little touches. Three of my favorites: you can choose what order you use to walk through this “museum”: sorted by type (racer, supercar, etc.), price (from 7,000 to yikes, 55,000,000), or (ha!) speed (from 15.6 to 254 mph). When you download a new car, you get to whisk off a little virtual tarpaulin to unveil it. And, at least for the ones I’ve done so far, you can listen to what the car sounds like when it accelerates. That all might not be the same as the real thing, but $4.99 is a little more in my price range than, let’s say, $2,100,000 (for a Pagani Zonda). More on “Road Inc.” after I have visited the whole “museum” but my initial visit made me smile.
A new book from the same source as New Exhibition Design 01 & 02, but now looking back, is now available for pre-order. Just pre-ordered mine. Due in January. (If you don’t have the first two, get them while you’re at it. Quite indispensable recent surveys.)
UPDATE, 30 Dec 2011: Just heard that the release date has been pushed back to March. Sigh.
I don’t really need any more proof that the Dutch can out-design us all. But if I did, I could refer to Engaging Spaces: Exhibition Design Explored, a new monograph by Amsterdam “exhibition architects” Kossman.dejong. The book is big, and so are the ideas in it. Highly recommended.
I was recently in Germany and picked up “Scenography / Szenografie”, a compendium of work by the formidable Prof. Uwe Brueckner and colleagues at Atelier Brueckner in Stuttgart. In US stores in February, available for preorder now.
The book is rather spectacular, further evidence of the remarkable progress of exhibition designers around the world over the past generation, particularly in Europe, where Stuttgart is a veritable hive of brilliant firms. US designers would do well to get a copy of this book and others.
I’m happily addicted to e-books (and i-books, I suppose) but I’ve always wondered why a book that’s not a book is still written like … a book. (I’ve given up wondering why digital music is still released as albums.) So when I stumbled on this new iPad book, written for iPad only, and replete with iPad-only features, I was delighted. It’s not a perfect new idea, but it’s a new idea, which counts for a lot. Now it just needs to be gorgeous.
On the opposite end of the spectrum comes this downright gorgeous iPad vintage synthesizer interface designed according to the “skeuomorphic” (i.e. real-world visual metaphor*) interface principles so beloved by Apple. In many ways, the exact opposite of the iPad-only book above. But it’s gorgeous, and that counts for a lot. Now it just needs to be new.
Some more thoughtful musings on skeuomorphic interface design here.
First of all, artist Joseph L. Griffiths has made himself quite a bicycle. Secondly, looking at this has started me thinking. We’re all talking about user-generated content in visitor experiences, and about participatory design. This has both of those in spades, but it’s got one more important thing we might sometimes forget: delight. The next time I am thinking too much, I’m going to imagine myself on this lovely bicycle, pedaling paint, and be better for it. Cheers, Mr. Griffiths. *
* By the way, Mr. G., the world really needs a video of this.
After years of quietly enjoying my ever-growing collection of books on exhibit design, museum planning and interactive spaces, I have finally come up with a way to share my bookshelf with everyone. I hereby announce the Exhibit Designer’s Bookshelf (beta), courtesy of Shelfari.
Click the link at the very top of this page, or here, and enjoy. More fancy features to come, this is just a start.
Many thanks to Jessica Griscti, bibliographer extraordinaire, for helping to make this happen.
Suggestions? Missing books? Useful? Not useful? Comments open below.
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:
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.
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
