Digital Collection Intern Nicolai Garcia recounts the experience of producing x-ray images of electronic objects from Cooper Hewitt's collection.
The Videosphere portable television is one of the late twentieth century’s most iconic electronic devices. Manufactured by JVC from 1970 through the early 1980s, it renders the postwar preoccupation with space exploration in plastic and acrylic—modern materials perfectly suited to the Videosphere’s cosmic aesthetic. The TV was designed to be versatile and mobile: it rotates 360° on...
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...
Though it weighs in at just 80 milligrams, you’ll definitely want this little RoboBee in your corner. Designers Kevin Y. Ma, Robert J. Wood, Pakpong Chirarattananon, and Sawyer B. Fuller at Harvard School of Engineering and Applies Sciences, in collaboration with the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, followed nature as their guide to create...
Kevin Cannon & Ashwin Rajan’s Frontline Gloves are a pair of networked gloves that allow firefighters to use hand gestures to communicate wirelessly in low-visibility, low-oxygen situations. The design incorporates customized electronics based on the ATMega chip, a wireless Xbee module, a sonar sensor, ultra-bright LEDs and bend sensors. The gloves allow the wearer to...
It’s hard to find examples of bad design that you can publish on a blog. I don’t suppose that’s surprising, as we all want to tell stories about our successes, but we’re happier when the failures fade into the gloom of obscurity. When you ask someone to name an example of bad design, the over-complex...
