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.
Morris Arboretum’s Tree Adventure exhibit Out on a Limb, designed by Metcalfe Architecture & Design, was the 2010 AIA Philadelphia Design Excellence Gold Medal Winner, 2010 AIA Pennsylvania Architectural Excellence Award, 2010 “Best of Philly” Award, and the 2010 American Association of Museums Excellence in Exhibition Design Award. Suspended 50 feet above the forest floor this network of walkways (450-feet in length) provides a bird’s eye view of the forest, complete with a giant Bird’s Nest, Squirrel Scramble rope, and many vista platforms.
The rather fab Turner Prize in the UK just went to Susan Philipsz, the “first person in the history of the award to have created nothing you can see or touch” (The Guardian). Philipsz is known for sound art, the “so-called fine art in which audio is the core if not sole constituent element” (BoingBoing).
This YouTube video of an echoing vocal work of her voice singing under a bridge is making the rounds. As both a recovering musician and a designer, this should be right up my alley. But I’m not sure what I think yet. In any case, it seems to have the art world in the UK a bit riled up. What do you think?
Via BoingBoing, seen first via my favorite news reader app, Pulse.
Mesmerizing: CERN’s new interactive exhibition center on YouTube. (Run it full screen for full effect.) Do you know the designers? Please comment below. Design by the excellent folks at Atelier Brückner. (Thanks, Phillip Teufel!)
Also on Flickr here. And more here. Via the excellent PLOT.
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 the new way to find your way at the American Museum of Natural History,” says the AMNH (and several hundred blogs) about their new iPhone app, appropriately named “Explorer:”
More from the Museum:
Chart your own course at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with AMNH Explorer—a new app that is part custom navigation system, part personal tour guide for the Museum’s world-famous halls. Providing turn-by-turn directions, AMNH Explorer takes visitors from the edge of the universe to the age of the dinosaurs. Choose from a variety of Museum-designed tours or create your own from a list of popular exhibits, specimens, or artifacts. AMNH Explorer also lets you share your adventures with friends and family by linking directly to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Download AMNH Explorer now and start planning your next visit or use your iPhone® or iPod® touch to discover the Museum’s must-sees from anywhere in the world.
More from the New York Times here. Links to the entire media frenzy here.
If you can’t make it to Shanghai for Expo 2010, these three videos by the (accurately named) Shanghai Expo Timelapse Machine give a sense of the different kinds of pavilions on display. Germany: a deep, varied exhibition with a variety of completely different interactive zones in the interior:
Denmark, completely the opposite, with a beautifully designed building and little else to “do” (not that anything more is needed):
And finally, the hauntingly beautiful, award-winning UK pavilion, the “Seed Cathedral”:
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.
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.
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
