We got in touch with Critter & Guitari, electronic instrument designers from Philadelphia, to ask them four questions about their practice of design, music, and art.

COOPER-HEWITT: Owen, you studied Music at Dartmouth, and Chris, you studied electronics at ITP. Tell us how you met and when/how you knew you wanted to work together.

CHRIS KUCINSKI: We actually met as freshmen in college. Owen showed up at school with a bunch of banjos he made. He could, and still can, pick on a banjo like crazy(!), but the fact that he built them left a much deeper impression. I hadn’t thought that was a possibility for me before then. We started playing music together and worked increasingly on art and building instruments.

OWEN OSBORN: Yes, creating music especially has been a common activity that makes it easy to work together, and a good way to get inspired as well. I think playing music with someone is a good way to become better at working on an intuitive level. Decisions start to flow with better rhythm and more efficiency.

Critter & Guitari's Pocket Piano MIDI

CH: Your instruments never use words or pictorial icons to explain buttons or controls. The Pocket Piano is a good example of this. Tell us more about this choice, and the challenges and rewards associated with it.

CK: We’re excited to design instruments where people can ignore a manual and go straight to figuring out what the instruments do. We’re always aiming for immediacy and fun in making music. Keeping both how the instrument works electronically and how one interacts with it as straightforward as possible is challenging at times. Hearing and seeing who and how someone plays our instruments is always awesome - pros, amateurs, kids, adults, animals.

OO: This is not so much a decision as a result of the process of streamlining a musical instrument - simplifying the interface so that it is more intuitive and fun to play. Approaching that point, there becomes less of a need for icons and explanation. This is definitely a challenge with electronics since electronic instruments can affect music on so many levels (it can become harder to tell what your movements have to do with the sound being created), but the payoff is the visual design becomes easier to manage as well.

CH: Do you identify as artists, designers, or both? How do you define these terms?

OO: We spend a bunch of time in both of these realms. Most of what we do at Critter & Guitari is turn our art experiments into products. So it usually starts with artmaking and music, and playing with different ways to do this. We might find something we like, and to make it into a product we have to start thinking about how it is put together, the materials, and how other people will use it.

CK: We’re pretty lucky that we get to go between those mindsets like that.

CH: What exciting things does the future hold for Critter & Guitari?

OO: New stuff! Instruments with better connectedness and simplicity. Continuing to experiment.

CK: We’re working on getting our instruments in space, as well. Seriously. We want a Kaleidoloop and Pocket Piano jam on the International Space Station, complete with the bleeps, bloops, and other noises the ISS normally makes! Maybe that recording will make the next Voyager Golden Record....

Target: Design in the Classroom is an innovative new program that brings Cooper-Hewitt, to NYC schools. This video shows a kids-eye-view into a full day of design workshops at P.S. 124 in South Ozone, Queens. All K-12 teachers in NYC are eligible for this free, hands-on design workshop.

Register online today at http://www.cooperhewitt.org/designK12registration to register your school for this exciting & free program.

Cooper-Hewitt recently acquired several original prototypes and drawings used to develop OXO's Good Grips product line. Cooper-Hewitt curators identified this line for the museum's collection because the products were a game-changing innovation iconic of late 20th century design. Watch this video to learn more about the story behind the objects.

Individuals whose own research explores the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition’s subject matter have been invited to write blog entries sharing their insights, related research and projects. – Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

Descriptions of the world’s informal settlements are often filled with two kinds of figures – images of families living and working in deeply impoverished conditions are matched with global urbanization statistics. Mediating between these two types of information is the process of enumeration and community mapping. Produced by citizens themselves, they reveal locations, conditions, and lives often unseen in plain sight.

Ushahidi, an open-source platform for information collection, visualization and interaction, as used on websites such as Voice of Kibera, reverses the top-down, omniscient position of power of institutionally produced maps. These interactive websites follow a methodology developed over 125 years ago by the female residents of the Hull-House Social Settlement located in the slums of the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, Illinois. There, under the direction of Florence Kelley, a trained social scientist and labor activist, the work of US Census agents conducting a “Special Investigation into the Slums of Great Cities” was translated by Hull-House residents into Nationalities and Wage Maps.

Although they may look conventional to us today, in 1893 when they were produced the Hull-House maps were the first of their kind in the United States. They made visible the complex overlaps of activity, ethnicity, race, income distribution, public and private space, and legal and illegal occupations in this immigrant district, rendering a three dimensional image of a space previously understood only as a “ghetto” or slum. Importantly, Hull-House residents lived within the neighborhood they surveyed and served.

Hull-House Social Settlement resident greeting visitors at the front door. Image courtesy Jane Addams Hull-House Photographic Collection, [JAMC_0000_0125_0528], University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections

Agnes Holbrook, in charge of the creation of the Hull-House maps, understood their importance in creating a “Kodak view [of a] shifting scene” of the district. Immigrants moved in and out of the tenements and old frame buildings were literally rolled away to make room for new factories. Although such social surveys arose out of concerns surrounding industrialization of the American city – thought to be unruly, wild, and uncontrollable – for the residents of Hull-House they were primarily a tool for social activism, and what Jane Addams, a co-founder of the settlement and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, referred to as “constructive work,” what we may refer to today as “social work.” With the information articulated in the maps the settlement’s residents were able to argue for health and sanitation, factory and labor (Florence Kelley founded the National Consumers League), and charity and child welfare (Julia Lathrop became the first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau) reform in the American city.

Enumeration of a community in Katima Mulilo, Namibia by Shack/Slum Dwellers International, from the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition. Credit: Melanie Fox, Smithsonian Institution, 2011.

While the residents of Hull-House lived in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward, their educational and class status distinguished them from most of their neighbors. Today techniques of census-taking and map-making enables citizens to advocate on their own behalf. Shack/Slum Dwellers International uses the tools of enumeration and mapping for the purposes of improving informal settlements and building communities. Design tools, both produced by residents and shared via horizontal dissemination, community-based mapping stresses local problem solving and community empowerment over top-down planning and control.

Map Kibera on the Voice of Kibera website, integrating the Ushahidi platform, from the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition. Credit: GroundTruth.

So too, Ushahidi advances community-based work, adding the important layer of interactivity and rapid dissemination of information. Where the Hull-House Nationalities map could only snap a picture of a moment in time the online Voice of Kibera is a “living project”, revealing conditions and reporting incidents of the informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya in real time. Overlaid on a locally produced Map Kibera , it is part of OpenStreetMap, an open-source map of the world. Both deeply local through on the ground annotation and networked through the use of GPS, SMS, and the internet, these maps allow a community to visualize and to represent itself – an embedded and embodied globalization.

Sharon Haar teaches architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago and the website Urban Archaeology Chicago. Her current research investigates the role of entrepreneurship, design innovation, and global networking in architectural practices devoted to social activism and humanitarian relief.