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 Ben Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the design team and one-time couple Gideon Löwy and Lone Lindinger-Löwy created a series of telephones called BeoCom, made for the Danish consumer electronics manufacturer Bang & Olufsen. The prefix “beo” is standard for all of Bang & Olufsen’s major products and the ending references the device’s purpose:...
The founder, chairman, and CEO of R/GA, a worldwide digital advertising agency, product and service innovator, and consultancy. Bob Greenberg is the 16th guest curator in Cooper Hewitt’s Selects series, in which prominent influencers, designers, and artists are invited to mine and interpret the museum’s collection of more than 210,000 objects. The R/GA team made three videos...
We’ve come so far technologically that cell phones are now in museums. And in a museum is likely the only place most people will have seen this model – the world’s first commercially available handheld cellular phone. When it came out, it weighed 2.5 pounds, required ten hours for charging for 35 minutes of talk...
Wow! I remember thinking that as a youngster, when I first saw the slightly flickering black and white picture on the Sony portable TV at a friend’s house—on the patio. That was the last place I could imagine anything like a television, something I had previously experienced only as a piece of furniture in people’s living...
Folding fans, or abanicos, were considered must-have accessories in nineteenth century Spain. For women, they served as important tools in courtship, the ‘language of the fan’ expressing everything from ‘come hither’ to ‘don’t bother’ to hopeful admirers. The imagery painted or printed on fans also carried important messages. Many celebrate national events, such as the...
In celebration of Women’s History Month, Cooper Hewitt is dedicating select Object of the Day entries to the work of women designers in our collection. “I believe that all designers come to a task with a unique way of ordering that is particular to their past experiences, and perhaps even their genetic structure,” says maverick...
In the 1930s, the Nazi party relied heavily on propaganda in order to spread its political and social views across Germany under the Third Reich. While this spread of ideas was most infamously carried out using military power, the government was also able to find its way into the homes and heads of the German...
Adinkra wrappers are traditionally worn for funerals. Their many symbols are printed from individually carved stamps, and the selection of symbols and their placement on the gridded cloth are considered a sort of communication from the living to the ancestors. Hundreds of unique symbols have been identified, but their meanings are not easily de-coded. Some...
