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.
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
A great little video of the Dieter Rams exhibit at the Design Museum in London, narrated by museum director Deyan Sudjic. Just lovely. (To me, design exhibits and exhibit design are sort of the same thing, somehow.)
PLOT Magazine continues to publish some of the best examples of new exhibition design and museum planning from Europe. In Vienna, the historical exhibit Battle for the City is filled with uncommon design ideas, from the nuanced to the wonderfully new (above, a surprisingly fresh treatment for exhibit walls). Unlike the printed magazine, PLOT’s web text is not in English, so here is a partial translation of the project description (any errors mine):
With Battle for the City, the Künstlerhaus in Vienna presents one of the greatest historical exhibitions in recent years. The show, designed by Viennese firm BWM Architekten und Partner, offers 2,000 square meters [21,500 square feet] of insights into the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s: the tension between democracy and dictatorship, avant-garde and provincialism, departure and resignation.
Artist-illustrator Lisa Congdon’s charmingly obsessive A Collection a Day 2010 blog intends to post a daily photograph of a different little collection of items owned by the artist. One suspects Ms. Congdon must have a lot of closets. Above: vintage flash cards. Via Swiss Miss.
My fellow designer parents know that all the well-designed, expensive, eco-friendly, perfectly color-coded Scandinavian brain toys in the world can’t hold a candle to any plastic toy that’s loud and blinks. But perhaps MoMA’s new Shape Lab, an interactive space for children that opened last month, can give us all a helping hand. (It’s rumored to be free, that won’t hurt either.) Via Kidcity.
Accessibility is deeply engrained into the exhibit design community, typically focused on visitors with trouble seeing or moving. But the situation is nuanced and counter-intuitive. For example, most visually-impaired visitors can’t read braille. And blindness is just one among many disabilities. Which ones do we plan for? Which do we leave out?
One universally-overlooked disability is colorblindness, even though it may be more common than any other: it may affect up to 10% of the population (mostly men). [Note: you can simulate what different hues look like with different types of colorblindness at Color Scheme Designer.]
Enter a new proposal from Portugal, Color Add, a concept for a system to tag color fields with monochromatic symbols for the colorblind. More after the break.
There seems to be a bit of a cyan-typography epidemic out there, but I didn’t realize that the symptoms had spread to museums. Both the Philadelphia History Museum and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry have unveiled new branding efforts recently.
I can’t seem find the original source, but a set of beautiful images of the exhibits at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany have just gone up on a number of different blogs.
The AIGA has just released a strong statement about the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA’s) recent call for logos for “Art Works,” which violates the AIGA’s guidelines on speculative work in the “communication design profession”. This is essential reading for any designer, and any cultural client. Or any client, for that matter.
As “crowdsourcing” becomes more and more prevalent, organizations like AIGA are important voices for some breeds of designer. But this is not an easy topic: speculative design work is in fact common in many design professions, particularly in architecture.
Just in my inbox: ESTO is circulating a portfolio of work by seven of their photographers. Beautiful as always (particularly the image above of graphics and exhibits at Yankee Stadium, which I’m unashamedly proud of having being involved in).
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
