A collecting initiative, launched in 2020, aims to help Cooper Hewitt to acquire objects that shape and define our time.
What emoji do you use to represent yourself? For Rayouf Alhumedhi in 2015, at the time a 15-year-old Saudi student living in Berlin, there wasn’t an emoji to represent her. Rayouf is Muslim and wears a hijab. In a group chat, each of Rayouf’s friends (who don’t wear headscarves) used the female emoji to represent...
In September this year, we launched Cooper Hewitt’s Responsive Collecting Initiative (RCI), a new effort at the museum to solicit, review, and ultimately add objects to the museum’s permanent collection that tell design stories about the historic moments we are living through. Back in March, we found ourselves in lockdown like the rest of the...
In celebration of the milestone 20th anniversary of the National Design Awards, this week’s Object of The Day posts honor National Design Award winners. A version of this post was originally published on October 1, 2014. Throughout the history of photography, advances in technology—from daguerreotype to digital photography—have continued to propel the field forward. Recently, the...
The honey-colored Botanica VI vase (Nepenthes Villosa) is composed of bois durci (sycamore wood and egg albumen), dewaxed shellac (a resin extracted from insect secretion), and beeswax. Part of the Botanica series, it represents a collection of vessels made from pre-industrial plastic that were created by Studio Formafantasma, a conceptual design practice known for its...
For the Paper Porcelain tableware series, designers Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings sought to translate paper models—an integral part of their design process—into porcelain. First, they sketched the forms, geometry, and color of the cups and saucers. The two-page concept drawing below, in Cooper Hewitt’s collection, was cut from the designers’ Moleskine sketchbook and dates...
Ten Thousand Cents is a crowdsourced digital project that combines thousands of individual drawings to create a representation of a $100 bill. Designers Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima divided a high-resolution scan of a $100 bill into 10,000 equal parts and posted the pieces to Amazon Mechanical Turk, a distributed labor tool launched in 2005....
Flight Patterns is a data visualization project from designer Aaron Koblin that traces domestic airline traffic during a single 24-hour period over North America. Flight paths, using datasets provided by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from 2005 and later from August 12, 2008, are rendered in color as arced trajectories. Koblin received flight locations every...
Throughout the history of photography, advances in technology – from daguerreotype to digital photography – have continued to propel the field forward. The Lytro camera represents the first major shift in consumer photography since digital image capture was invented in 1975, and marks a significant turning point in photography’s history by offering users the possibility...
The work of contemporary Dutch designer Nicolette Brunklaus is filled with narrative and imagination. She often manipulates photography to generate pattern and tell a story, whether printing a wooded forest scene on the interior of a lampshade, or, as in Blond Curtain, digitally printing long blond tendrils on velvet to create a curtain. The textile, at...
Tokujin Yoshioka’s ToFU lamp is magical. The spare form—a square cut delicately from clear methacrylate resin—conducts light only around its edges, stemming from a single halogen bulb. It is as though light itself is harnessed in the design, caught within and released by the material in a minimal, sensual gesture.
The holiday season is a special time of year to reflect on family and… jewels! Hemmerle’s Egyptian Story bangle is a particularly exceptional jewel. Not only does it evoke the firm’s distinctive voice, showcasing innovative techniques and material combinations to create a bold, modern jewel enriched with cultural references, but it provides a bit of...
Design Miami/ is always a stunning collection of modern and contemporary design under one roof, but can be a bit overwhelming without knowing where to look. I led tours of the fair (the Museum’s second tour collaboration with DM/) to provide insight into this year’s highlights, connecting the works on view and illuminating themes. Honestly,...
The MyLight.MGX, a hanging lamp by designer Lars Spuybroek for Belgian-based manufacturer Materialise NV, illustrates the possibilities of computerized production methods. Made in 2007, it was digitally printed (also known as 3D printing) using the process of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). With SLS, a computer controls an infrared laser that solidifies miniscule layers of powdered material—in this case, polyamide, or nylon. The object is then additively built, layer upon layer. There are no molds, there is no assemblage of multiple parts. The object is printed in its entirety.
The ProSolve 370e system consists of modular architectural tiles coated with titanium dioxide that, when activated by daylight, neutralizes nitrogen oxides—harmful for their effect on the respiratory system, acid rain, and ozone depletion—in the surrounding environment. While the antimicrobial and air-purifying effects of titanium dioxide have been known for years, it is the form and application of ProSolve that is particularly innovative.
