Yo' MoMA

The recent Design and the Elastic Mind show has come and gone at MoMA in New York, however the struggle to gain relevancy in a constantly changing world will plague designers for years to come. The Exhibition opens on the realization that our relationships with space, time, matter, and individuality are being revolutionized by technological advances. As designers, our challenge is to harness the technology at our fingertips to create change for the better. We can help to ease humanity into a new era of living through our thought explorations, sensitivity, understanding of what we have, and more importantly, what is to come. The collection of designers have used their grasp of monumental technological changes that demand wide changes in behavior, to create objects and systems accessible to everyday people.

Some pieces, like The Honeycomb Vase by Studio Libertini, were not only stunning in their own right, but show a creative and playful way to approach design and creation. Other ideas, are at the cutting egde of communications technology; new technology by nokia and motorolla. Taking communications further was a device that could tell what mood a dog was in by the speed it wagged its tail. Non-working cellular devices are part of a study by IDEO in London to learn about effects of cellphones on mental and emotional health.

One of the most interesting, yet least complete pieces was a video by Greg Lynn, Peter Frankfurt and Alex Macdowell that explored the "New City". They asked themselves how people would live, behave, travel, and communicate in the future. Unfortunately, they spent more time on their 3D renderings than thoroughly answering their own questions.

Also fascinating were graphs and diagrams of information found on the internet. Changes to Wikipedia pages mapped in bright photoshop colors, neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of felons and inmates arrowed in red. Although the information hasn't been analyzed, it was an interesting reminder of the amount of information a quick internet search puts in front of us.

As projects fluctuated from nano to cosmic, tiny chips that will change the life of a heart attack victim, to new designs for space stations, it became clear that computation and calculations done by computers can give us an edge, but a human touch is what makes a project responsive to the real world.

For more information: http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/