Peeling potatoes is tedious enough without having to do battle with ill-designed kitchen gadgets. Why hadn’t these objects evolved to accommodate users, rather than the other way around? Sam Farber found himself wondering just that when he noticed his wife Betsey, who suffered from arthritis in her hands, struggling to use an old-fashioned peeler. Farber...

George Schmidt might have been on to something in 1987 when he wrote to Cooper Hewitt curator David McFadden that he was “firmly convinced that plastic is finally losing the murky reputation of the past as a cheap substitute material and is being accepted as a viable contemporary medium.” This mug, from Schmidt’s 1986 line...

Liberty and immigration: here are values so intimately tied with the history of the United States and New York in particular, that they seem to permeate one another. The year 1974 was a strenuous one for the US. The recent end of the Vietnam War left open wounds still seething in the minds of millions,...

Resembling a child’s toy more than a piece of furniture, the whimsical form of the Spun Chair, designed by Thomas Heatherwick and his team, Heatherwick Studio, came about in answer to the question, ‘Can a rotationally symmetrical form make a comfortable chair?’ Heatherwick and his colleagues were initially inspired by the traditional manufacturing process of...

Bacco is the Italian name for Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and intoxication. The legendary festivals in his honor were devoted to wild drinking, freedom, and sexual promiscuity, and the word Bacchanalia has become synonymous with orgy. However, scholars debate the specifics of these events and are left with limited resources for interpretation. The...

Angela Riechers is a student from an interdisciplinary graduate-level course on the Triennial taught by the Triennial curatorial team. Her first post titled “Green Burials: Recycling Our Loved Ones” appeared on the Design Blog July 9th and was met with a huge response. We figured a follow up was warranted!   Despite the 21st century’s...

Over the next two weeks on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Blog, students from an interdisciplinary graduate-level course on the Triennial taught by the Triennial curatorial team blog their impressions and inspirations of the current exhibition,‘Why Design Now?’. The Capsula Mundi coffin is designed to allow a body to decompose naturally and provide nourishment for a tree...

Fernando and Humberto explain their TransPlastic series as a fictional story wherein, in a world made of plastic, synthetic matter eventually becomes fertile ground for transgenic creations in which nature grows from and eventually overpowers plastic. The Trans… chair, the final piece in the Campanas’ TransPlastic collection, was designed especially for Cooper-Hewitt and is featured...