At the end of the introduction to the Multiple Choice exhibition, the curator reflects that, “as contemporary design industries move to open-sourcing and electronic formats for the marketing of their products, physical samples may soon become obsolete.” From a future academic and archival view point, this is a sad possibility, as material sampling formats contain...

One of the themes running through Design Life Now is the opening up of media to everyday citizens. There’s been an explosion of “social media”—Web sites that allow people to build communities and talk with each other on-line. (Blogs like this are one example.) This communications revolution is affecting print as well digital media. Fueled...