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 Ben Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries....

Manufactured by Dedar, the furnishing fabric Present Perfect has the visual qualities of a hand-embroidered textile, with its asymmetrical and punctuated patterning, but it is a jacquard-woven fabric that plays with texture and light. The abstract composition of geometric shapes realized with yarns of different thicknesses, colors, and material is distinctive against the jute and...

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. Dieter Rams, Chief Design Officer for German consumer products manufacturer Braun AG from 1961-95, designed the neutral and unassuming L1 speaker in 1957. Influenced by Braun’s...

In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Today’s blog post was written by Andrea Osgood and originally published March 31, 2014. In the late 1920s, industrial design began to emerge as a viable field in the United States.  Because of the Great Depression, there...