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Behind the Design | Watercolor Maptiles
In the latest installment in the Behind the Design program series. Curator Andrea Lipps, conservator Jessica Walthew, and Stamen Design’s founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck discuss Watercolor Maptiles—a web-based, open-source mapping tool that displays OpenStreetMap’s data with the hand-hewn textures of watercolor paint. Launched by Stamen Design in 2012, Watercolor Maptiles is part of...
Image features laptop computer in a low, black rectangular housing, hinged at top center to open, clamshell-style, revealing a screen and keyboard. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Milestone of Early Laptop Computer Development
The GRiD Compass laptop was an innovation due to its clamshell case. A media conservator discusses how to assess and maintain the digital elements within.
Image features white 3D-printed construction toy kit connectors of various shapes and sizes. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Preserving 3D Data and 3D Prints
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....
Image features square black form, hinged at the top and opened to reveal an LDC screen showing a black and white drawing of an office with clock and in and out boxes on the wall, a file cabinet, and a desktop in the foreground having a telephone, rolodex, letter, pad, and calendar. A row of icons for different functions is below the desk. A short antenna is attached on right side of the lid, near the hinge. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Predecessor of Today’s Smartphones
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....
Image features: Small portrait showing a woman's eye and nose, resembling an out-of-focus black and white photograph. Study for Binary Traces: Kay (2007-33-1). Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Halfseen
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Lia Cook’s creative process combines photographic media and computer-aided technologies with a mastery of hand and powered Jacquard looms. Her black-and-white work is based on scanned photographs, which are manipulated on a computer. Digital technology enables her...
Image features a cube made up of eight smaller, gridded cubes that display color gradients. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Aesthetics of the Color Plotter
To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition. Today’s post was originally published on October 29th, 2016.    A cube split into eight floating blocks, situated in isometric perspective. Each block comprised of 49...
YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS TROUBLE PARKING IN NEW YORK CITY
This is the last of six posters in the Flocking Diplomats series by Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross, founders of design firm Catalogtree.  Each poster in the series of information graphics is a different visual representation of the same set of data, allowing the viewer to engage with the information through a different lens each time.  Posters focus...
Business of Design 2014 | Digital Life
On October 8, 2014, leading business and design innovators were invited to Cooper Hewitt’s Business of Design Breakfast, an annual invitation-only National Design Awards event for business leaders to discuss how good design is good business. Teresa Yoo, Vice President of Brand Strategy and Experience Design at IBM moderated the conversation, which was hosted by...
Smiling woman holding a book with colorful die-cut pages.
Meet the Staff: Pamela Horn
Can you explain a little bit about the type of work you do? I develop content for publication in multiple formats: print books, ebooks, magazines, blog posts, web content, in gallery interactives, and as exhibition labels. What do you enjoy most about your work? The collaboration among the various departments at the museum. I adore...
4 Questions 4: Anab Jain
The latest in our 4 Questions 4 interview series features Anab Jain, founding partner of Superflux, a collaborative design practice based in Ahmedabad and London. Anab is a designer and entrepreneur who has worked in film, interaction design, and innovation consulting. Educated in India, Vienna and London, Anab has an MA with distinction in Interaction...
Clearview Project
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has just acquired its first digital font, the Clearview family of typefaces. Featured in Cooper-Hewitt’s 2010 National Design Triennial: Why Design Now? exhibition, Clearview is a beautiful example of design as a form of social activism. As baby boomers reach their mid- to late sixties, highway sign legibility has become an...
Students Aim “High” With Interaction Design Projects
  High-school students in New York City are part of an ever increasing digital generation. They not only have an extensive knowledge about social media tools and technology— but also use it on a daily basis. A few of these teens participated in a workshop series at Cooper-Hewitt on interaction design, or design that focuses...
Meet the Digital (youth) Interns
Digital (youth) interns tag objects in the Museum collection! Through the on-going program A City of Neighborhoods project the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum selected 5 students as digital (youth) interns. During a one-week internship youth met with curators at the Museum to discuss the e-museum collection and learn about the curatorial departments. The Digital Interns...
The Tangible Earth Project – Professor Shinichi Takemura
The Devastating Effect of the Tsunami in Sendai, Japan, on March 11th, 2011 The horrifying images on television of the earthquake and tsunami that afflicted the Japanese coastline last Friday remind us of the fragility of the civilization that we have developed on our planet, and show the enormous power of nature. Professor Shinichi Takemura...
Tangible Tuesdays: OnObject
Tangible Earth, the interactive globe now on view here at Cooper-Hewitt, engages the sense of touch to create a feeling of connection between people and their planet. Lots of designers today are exploring ways to enhance digital devices with touch. For example, MIT Media Lab’s OnObject system can turn any object into a tactile interactive...