MoMA | Tag: This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good

Posts tagged ‘This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good’

December 24, 2015 | Collection & Exhibitions

Good Design Does Well

Posted by Pamela Popeson, Department Preparator, Department of Architecture and Design

Being a New Yorker may mean I don’t have the best Pollyanna game going, but it doesn’t stop me from being a true-blue fan of acts of good citizenship. Teddy Roosevelt said that the “first requisite of a good citizen in the Republic of ours is that he be able and willing to pull his weight.” As a staunch defender of the environment; I’d bet Teddy would also be an avid recycler if he were around today, and I’m sure he’d count recycling as an essential act of good citizenship.

You can’t tell me you don’t feel at least a little pleased with yourself, knowing you’re doing the right thing, every time you separate your glass and your cardboard. Yes, it’s a nuisance, but as we used to say back in the early days of the modern environmental movement: “If you’re not part of the solution…you’re part of the pollution.”

Gary Anderson. Recycling Symbol. 1970

The first Earth Day made its way onto the scene in 1970, and shortly thereafter the Container Corporation of America, a major user of recycled products, sponsored an environmental symbols graphic arts contest. Gary Anderson, an architecture student from California, won with his now famously ubiquitous design of a three-part Möbius strip with open points offering entry into recycling’s never-ending cycle of use—reuse at each turn. Though the Universal Recycling Symbol resides in the public domain, it has also been added to The Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design collection, and can be found on the gallery walls in the current exhibition This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good. The exhibition takes its title from Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s 2012 London Olympic Stadium tweet, and sets off to explore design’s possible egalitarian (or not-so-egalitarian) ways.

Marjan van Aubel & James Shaw. Well Proven Stool. 2014. Bioresin and cherry wood, 25 3/16 x 15 3/4 x 13 3/4″ (64 x 40 x 35 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Architecture and Design Funds. Photographer: Jonathan Muzikar

Also on view in the exhibition are Marjan van Aubel and James Shaw’s eco-friendly Well Proven Stools. Upon learning that that there is a 50 to 80 percent timber wastage in the process of manufacturing wood products from wood planks, the Dutch-British design team decided to build a series of stools and chairs that could use/reuse all of this industrial by-product.

Marjan van Aubel and James Shaw. Well Proven Stool. 2014

They devised a method and recipe for forming the seats from a bio-resin-impregnated mix of recycled wood sawdust, chips, and shavings. Perched upon traditional legs made of turned ash, walnut, or cherry, the pigmented spongy-looking foam and wood chip-mix seats make for an unconventional, but not unattractive, appearance.

Bio-resins are made from organic or plant materials instead of the usual fossil-fuel base, and are themselves recyclable. The material is sturdy and strong yet quite light making the Well Proven Stool possess exactly the qualities you’d want in a stool: comfortable, durable, rugged, and portable, plus they’re environmentally responsible. What could be more equable?

Two Well Proven Stools are on view until January 17, in This is for Everyone. The Universal Recycling Symbol </em>can be found everywhere.

October 16, 2015 | Events & Programs, Learning and Engagement

This Is For You: Design Interactions at the Studio

Posted by Jess Van Nostrand, Assistant Director, Exhibition Programs and Gallery Initiatives, Department of Education

Yuri Suzuki. Colour Chaser. 2010–13. Plastic and electronics components. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer. Photograph by Hitomi Kai Yoda

What would music made from a conversation between a robot and a drawing sound like? How can you improve someone’s day using only creativity and an old toothbrush? Can discarded electronics be repurposed to make a responsive video project about endangered species?

March 27, 2015 | Collection & Exhibitions, Design

This Is for Everyone: Free Play

Posted by Pamela Popeson, Department Preparator, Department of Architecture and Design

Golan Levin. Free Art and Technology Lab, R. Shawn Sims, Sy-Lab. Free Universal Construction Kit. 2012. Digital CAD files and 80 3-D-printed nylon units. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Committee on Architecture & Design and Shapeways

When the world we live in feels too impossible I find myself imagining the world I want to live in. It’s not just about the major acts of horrific inhumanity that humans bestow upon one another, it’s about the small daily indignities too. In the world I want to live in we’re not senselessly slaughtering each other, and no one throws trash on the ground or holds the entire communal table in the coffee shop hostage with their cell phone conversation, either. And people actually do step aside to let the passengers off the train. In the world I want to live in, it’s understood that we are all in this together. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I’m convinced that the smallest effort toward compatibility goes a long way.

March 26, 2015 | Collection & Exhibitions, MoMA Stores

Future Couture: Nervous System’s Kinematics Dress

Posted by Johanna Lenander, Content Marketing Manager, Retail

Nervous System (est. 2007), Jessica Rosenkrantz (American, b. 1983), Jesse Louis-Rosenberg (American, b. 1986). Kinematics Dress. 2013. Laser-sintered nylon. Image courtesy of Steve Marsel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Architecture and Design Funds

One of the most fascinating pieces in the current design exhibition This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good is a pretty dress with a classically feminine silhouette that wouldn’t look out of place at a fashionable cocktail party. But take a closer look at its supple but strangely undulating texture, and you’ll find that this frock is like no garment you have ever seen—because it was created with a printer.

March 11, 2015 | Design, Viewpoints

Paola Antonelli on Curating, MoMA’s Collection, and Design Today: A Reddit AMA Recap

Posted by MoMA Staff,

Paola Antonelli, Director of Research and Development, and Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Photo: Robin Holland

Paola Antonelli, Director of Research and Development, and Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Robin Holland

Last week, MoMA’s senior curator of Architecture and Design and director of R&D, Paola Antonelli, answered questions for Reddit users as part of the interview series Ask Me Anything (AMA). Having just reinstalled MoMA’s design galleries for the exhibition This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good—which includes several new acquisitions, including the @ symbol and the Wyss Institute’s Human Organs-on-Chips—Antonelli offered some insights into her work, MoMA’s collection, and the future of design.

March 4, 2015 | Collection & Exhibitions, Design

Is This for Everyone? New Design Acquisitions at MoMA

Posted by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design Michelle Millar Fisher, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design

What do Susan Kare’s graphic designs for user interface icons, The Living’s mycelium bricks, and Formafantasma’s speculative Botanica series of vessels have in common? Apart from each being compelling contemporary design experiments in their own right, they’re also part of the newest crop of acquisitions welcomed into The Museum of Modern Art’s collection, and all are now on public display in the recently opened exhibition This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.