design and the elastic mind

the museum of modern art in nyc is hosting an exhibit entitled design and the elastic mind a great title that is more than backed up by the content. the conceptual ground floor for this exhibit reads like this “over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace‚ working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration.” nice!

this premise is opened out to a much greater extent here.


the site is rich, very very detailed and dense but well worth an exploration. the exhibit is grouped under the general headings of “thinkering”, “people and objects”, “design for debate”, “visualization”, “thought to action”, “all together now”, and “super nature”. specific subject matter covers the spectrum from computational origami to a series of projects in which data harvested from the internet is translated into a visual representation that graphically delineates the relational pieces of the data so that (for example) a dating service might reveal a single person represented by a small balloon, surrounded by a set of balloons each of which represents people that that person may have dated, this exhibit presents hundreds of topics addressed by out-of-the-box thinkers and organizations, each of which will leave you excited for the future.

the actual site interface itself is an interesting one to navigate requiring a degree of intuition and an equal degree of patience as you decode the symbols, determine which dots activate which elements and so on. this is perhaps an accidental feature of the whole piece but one which makes for little moments of excitement as you discover a little nook or niche that you hadn’t expected.

other cool features include a series of fascinating google earth mashups, a section devoted to what is termed local and individual power which consists of projects that are generated through renewable sources and even a pair of shoes that store energy from the process of walking and running which is later used to power small personal appliances.

i am very interested in biomimetics right now and was very happy to discover a section devoted to “biomimicry”. here’s an example of one application of biomimicry to aid in the design solution of a small vehicle developed by mercedes-benz.

the boxfish:
the process towards a design solution developed by nature . . .