This week’s posts feature case studies from Cooper Hewitt’s Digital Collections Management Project, a conservation survey of born-digital and hybrid objects in the permanent collection. The two-year project was coordinated by an in-house team of conservators, curators, and registrar, and was conducted by digital conservation specialist Cass Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....
Today’s Object of the Day celebrates the winners of Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Awards. Honoring lasting achievement in American design, the Awards take place annually during National Design Week, with festivities for all ages celebrating design creativity and innovation. Today’s post was originally published on September 9, 2015. “When was the last time someone offered...
Eve Andrée Laramée is an installation sculptor whose work challenges assumptions about the authority of history, science, and art. This textile, which Laramée designed as the focal point of A Permutational Unfolding, her 1999 exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center Gallery, confronts the standard history of the computer as a descendant of calculating or...
Toolboxes come in all shapes and sizes. They offer a resting place for the mechanic’s hand tools and a protective environment for the chef’s knives. Yet such toolboxes serve a select audience. In the 21st-century, the computer is the universal toolbox, used by billions of people across the globe. Early computers, including Bill Moggridge’s influential GRiD Compass...
Officially announced this month, version 1.0 of the definition for Open Source Hardware is complete. Similar to Open Source Software, Open Source Hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The Arduino Microcontroller is an example...
http://observermedia.designobserver.com/audiofile.html?entry=20918 Hear Cooper-Hewitt Director Bill Moggridge talk about design with Debbie Millman on Design Observer. In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, he discusses, the evolution, design and life to come of the laptop, the 20 year arch of technology, the meaning of human-centered design and his plans for future work at...
The phrase “Web 2.0” refers to the rise of social media over the past four or five years, in which users post their own content as well as shaping the way existing content is viewed through commenting, voting, rating, tagging, and other forms of interaction. Blogging is a big part of this. Most people are...
Many people complain that technology is isolating people from their fellow humans. I disagree. E-mail, cell phones, FedEx, Blackberries, and other systems are keeping people more in touch than ever. Indeed, many of us are expected to be “reachable” 24/7. One of the themes of Design Life Now is how design brings people together, through...
