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What is Talk to Me?
Talk to Me is an exhibition on the communication between people and objects that opened at The Museum of Modern Art on July 24th 2011. It features a wide range of objects from all over the world, from interfaces and products to diagrams, visualizations, and furniture, dreamed up by by bona-fide designers, students, scientists, all designed in the past few years or currently under development.
As you can tell, our net was cast very wide and the exhibition happened at the end of a long hunting and gathering exercise. This online journal has documented the process and progress of Talk to Me, and lives on to prolong the delight and continue the conversation.
While doing our research we used this blog as a tool to organize out findings: under the queue tab you could find projects that piqued our interest and were awaiting further research, whereas if something was tagged as checked, it had already gone successfully through the initial phase and it sat in our preliminary database, categorized by type of design. When we began organizing the exhibition and the catalogue, we classified our finds in a new way, by scale, under the who's talking? tab. This is how they remain organized today in the exhibition, catalogue and on the official website for the show, www.moma.org/talktome.
By allowing you behind the scenes of Talk to Me, we hope to shed some light on the curatorial process.
—the TTM curatorial team archive
- November 2011 (1)
- October 2011 (11)
- September 2011 (13)
- August 2011 (6)
- July 2011 (1)
- November 2010 (1)
- September 2010 (2)
- June 2010 (2)
- May 2010 (1)
- April 2010 (3)
- March 2010 (4)
categories
- Checked (3)
- Events (1)
- Just In (1)
- Uncategorized (39)
- Updates (1)
Blogroll
- 10,000 Words
- A bunch of stuff about game controllers
- app.itize.us
- Auger Loizeau
- Bobulate
- Boing Boing
- Bolt | Peters
- Brand Avenue
- Brynnafred
- Change Observer
- Core 77
- Culture
- D-Crit at SVA
- Daring Fireball
- Design Boom
- Design Droplets
- Design Observer
- Designing Devices
- dezeen
- Digital Urban
- Dynamist
- Engadget
- EXP
- Fast Company
- Gizmodo
- Good
- Google Blogoscoped
- Google Operating System
- Graphpaper
- Guerilla Innovation
- Henrik Werdelin
- Hrag Vartanian
- Information is Beautiful
- Infrastructurist
- INSIDE/OUT
- interactions magazine
- Interactive Architecture
- Interactive Institute Umea
- Interactive Multimedia Technology
- Inventing Interactive
- It's Nice That
- Kevin Kelly
- Kottke
- Layer Tennis Live
- Lifehacker
- Mashable
- Mauj
- movito
- Murketing
- Netdiver
- New York Times | Bits
- Nussbaum on Design
- O'Reilly Radar
- Pink Tentacle
- Print Blog
- PSFK
- RAPP Blog
- ReadWriteWeb
- Rhizome
- Robin Sloan
- Scobleizer
- Scripting News
- Significant Objects
- Smashing Magazine
- Speedbird
- Strange Maps
- Studio 360
- Studio Banana
- Subtraction
- Swiss Miss
- TechCrunch
- TED blog
- The Arch
- The Official Google Blog
- Thinking for a Living
- Touch Blog
- Toxel
- TUAW
- TUI Blog by Form+Zwek
- Walker Art Center | Design
- We Make Money Not Art
- WIRED | Gadget Lab
our idea of great design
Criteria/What we’re looking for:
How will we select works for Talk to Me and frame them within the wider mission of The Museum of Modern Art? When it comes to selecting objects for MoMA, there are no hard and fast rules, but there are several criteria that come into play in the discussion:
Form and Meaning. Certainly an important criterion in an art museum, and yet an elusive and subjective one, beauty is today tied to meaning. Objects have to communicate values that go well beyond their formal–and functional—presence, starting from the designer’s idea and intention. The best objects embody these concepts in a transparent way.
Function and Meaning. Just like form, function has also changed dramatically in the last few decades. Some objects are designed to provide certain emotions, feelings, and inspiration, and these aspects are also considered part of their functional makeup.
Innovation. Good designers take scientific and technological revolutions and transform them into objects that anybody can use. Curators are constantly for objects that solve new problems or address old ones in a new way, as well as for objects that introduce new and promising forms, materials, or structures.
Cultural Impact. MoMA has always privileged objects that, whether mass-marketed or developed experimentally in a designer’s workshop, have the power to influence and touch the greatest number of people. Their impact can be either direct, effective the minute they get purchased and brought into people’s lives, or building up in time through the inspiration they give to other designers.
Process. Curators—and people—do not take objects at face value, anymore. The way they are designed and built; the economy of means evident in their production, distribution, and use; the way the address complexity by celebrating simplicity; Respect and honesty in use of materials. Consideration of the entire life cycle of the product.
Necessity. Here comes the ultimate litmus test: if this object had never been designed and manufactured, would the world miss out, even just a bit? As disarming as this question might seem, it really works. Try it at home.