Applied Design exhibition

EXHIBITION _ The Museum of Modern Art in New York presents Applied Design, the exhibition that features outstanding examples of interface and interaction design, dynamic visualizations, products, furniture, 3D printed chairs and bowls, emergency equipment, and biodesign.

The exhibition is organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Kate Carmody, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design and is on view until January 31, 2014.

In the past twenty years, design has branched out in new directions that have galvanized young practitioners, sparked business models, and attracted worldwide public attention. 

"Design is not only about making things, people, and places pretty. Like the artifacts of applied design on view here, it is sometimes ugly, but it is always meaningful, and it encompasses all facets of human activity, including science, education, politics, and even war." explains Paola Antonelli.

Installation view of the exhibition (2013) Photo by Jason Mandella; Top: Massoud Hassani, Mine Kafon wind-powered deminer (2011) Photo by Rene van der Hulst.

Mine Kafon for example, Massoud Hassani’s dandelion-shaped mine detonator, is equipped with a GPS to record a safe path and designed to roll through mine fields. If the object, made from bamboo and biodegradable plastics, encounters a mine and detonates it, it will only partially destruct and can be salvaged and reassembled into a new specimen ready for deployment.

Markus Kayser’s Solar-sintered bowl was made using desert sand and sun. The process of converting a powder into a solid by heating is known as sintering, and it is central in 3D printing, a process by which computer-controlled machines deposit or solidify liquid or powdered resin layer by layer, to create a three-dimensional rendering of a digital design. 

Wind Map, by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, is an online application that pulls information from the publicly available National Digital Forecast database, rendering a living portrait of the wind landscape over the United States.

TORU IWATANI, Pac-Man (1980-1981) Video game Gift of NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.

The Earthquake Proof Table by Ido Bruno and Arthur Brutter is inexpensive, lightweight, and can provide shelter and protection during earthquakes by absorbing the impact of falling debris.

The 14 video games, the seedbed for an initial wish list of about 40 to be acquired in the near future, features: Pac-Man (1980), Tetris (1984), Another World (1991), Myst (1993), SimCity 2000 (1994), Vib-ribbon (1999), The Sims (2000), Katamari Damacy (2004), EVE Online (2003), Dwarf Fortress (2006), Portal (2007), flOw (2006), Passage (2008), Canabalt (2009). The criteria
used to select these specific games emphasized not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design.

Watch the VIDEO of APPLIED DESIGN presented by Paola Antonelli 

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York