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....
In celebration of our new exhibition The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, this Object of the Day post explores the multisensory experience of an object in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection. The name of Lucien Lelong unquestionably conjures up the luxurious world of French fashion. Born in Paris as the son of a textile shop owner, Lelong...
For the Paper Porcelain tableware series, designers Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings sought to translate paper models—an integral part of their design process—into porcelain. First, they sketched the forms, geometry, and color of the cups and saucers. The two-page concept drawing below, in Cooper Hewitt’s collection, was cut from the designers’ Moleskine sketchbook and dates...
This stool is a prototype made by French designer Patrick Naggar, who trained as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts and places architecture at the center of his design practice in order to experiment with forms and structures. Naggar also trained in urban studies and his approach to design brings together the functional and...
From cutting-edge karaoke to interactive chair mazes, students envision museum exhibitions of the future. On February 13, DesignPrep students met for their final of four sessions with Angela Chen and Erika Tarte, professional interaction and graphic designers from the firm Local Projects, to present their ideas developed over the prior three weeks. Inspired by works...
Cooper-Hewitt is launching a series of FREE workshops for NYC teens on building, programming, and prototyping with the Makerbot 3D printer. Participants will learn how to assemble, program, and print their designs on the Makerbot 3-D printer. They’ll learn about hardware, software, and 3D modeling software like Google Sketchup and Blender. This is a huge...
These third graders from P.S. 59 in the Bronx recently tackled some big design challenges when they came to participate in our Target Design K12 program. Here they are demonstrating their fantastic prototype vehicles, made during the popular Green Transportation Workshop. Made possible by a generous grant from Target, the free Tour + Workshop program...
Designed by Patrick Jouin (French, born 1967), Manufactured by Materialise NV, Leuven, Belgium, 2004, Epoxy resin, Museum purchase from the Members’ Acquisitions Fund of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2009-8-1, Photo: Matt Flynn As part of Cooper-Hewitt’s efforts to explore and document outstanding examples of innovative design, the Museum has begun to collect objects produced...
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?’. If there is one design on view at the 2010 Triennial that affects the lives of every...