Cooper Hewitt Reopening Media Highlights

Opening the New Cooper Hewitt Earned Media Highlights June 2014–March 2015

After being closed for three years, it has been immensely gratifying to see the excitement that both press and visitors have for the new Cooper Hewitt. The media placements in this report are highlights, but we are as proud of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles as the Associated Press review, which was picked up by news outlets across the country, from Seattle to San Antonio. The wide-sweeping coverage of the transformed museum includes all forms of media, from print and online to broadcast and radio. Placements continue to this day with two articles in the March 2015 special Museum section of the New York Times, and feature stories just last week in The Verge and Gizmodo on our new interactive experiences and the launch of the Pen.

The numbers: 

4.7 billion circulation of earned media

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120 media attended the December press preview

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92 media attended the June announcement event

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25 elite Instagrammers attended an Instameet preview in December

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25 tech and cultural insiders attended a Pen Social before the Pen was launched

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100 Instagram followers prior to 12/12/14

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175,000 Instagram followers as of 12/31/14

Enjoy!

Jennifer Northrop Director of Communications + Marketing

March 17, 2015

December 12, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/arts/design/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museumreopens.html?ref=arts

December 12, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/arts/design/a-look-at-the-redesigned-cooper-hewitt.html?ref=arts

December 14, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/02/28/fashion/20141214-bill-cunningham-eveninghours.html

Labels, Digital Included, Assume New Importance at Museums

By David Wallis The New York Times March 17, 2015 Like a primatologist observing gorillas in the wild, Judy Rand sometimes prowls around museums to spy on visitors. Ms. Rand, a museum consultant in Seattle and an acclaimed writer of exhibit labels, loves spotting guests reading her work aloud.

When visitors share information from labels, “we are reaching new readers — passalong readers,” Ms. Rand said. “Then they have a chance to have a conversation about it.

Then they can remember things.”

Lucy Harland, a museum consultant in Glasgow, encourages her clients to monitor their museums covertly for mutterers. “When you see people muttering under their breath, that is when you know” the label fails, she said.

Museums increasingly pay attention to labels — or “brief, little ambassadors,” in the words of Beverly Serrell, author of “Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach.”Specialists often write, edit and design labels, and some museums impanel focus groups to test them. Many cultural institutions have also turned to digital technology to transform static labels into compelling interactive attractions.

It is a monumental shift from the clay drum discovered in the ruins of Ennigaldi-Nanna’s museum in Babylon (now modern-day Iraq). The cylinder, which has text in three languages, dates to the sixth century B.C. and is considered to be the first object label.

“Labels have always been a big topic in museological practice,” said Seb Chan, director of digital and emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. He cites a blistering 1963 article, “Why Johnny Can’t Read Labels,” published in Curator: The Museum Journal. The author, George Weiner of the Smithsonian Institution, derided many midcentury museums as “veritable masterpieces of cryptography” because of terse, uninformative labels (called tombstones in curatorial jargon). He also railed against rambling labels “designed to frighten off all but the most persevering museum viewer.”

Some curators apparently use labels to show off their scholarship. (The Bad Label Hall of Fame website catalogs egregious examples.) “It often feels like museum labels are written for peers, not the public,” Mr. Chan said. Ms. Harland agreed. “If you need to write 50,000 words,” she advised colleagues, “do a talk for the local historical society.”

In a lecture, “Adventures in Label Land,” Ms. Rand, who tries to limit labels to about 50 words, highlights a vintage label that described a meteorite from the Field Museum in Chicago: “With the rise of the nickel content to around 14 percent, plessite prevails wholly, the kamacite becomes vestigial, and the structure becomes a nickel-rich ataxite

(see label at right).” Written for mineralogists rather than families, the label, it seems, required its own label.

“The ‘label at right’ was a second, equally dense label,” Ms. Rand said.

Research by Stephen Bitgood, a psychology professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, proves that brevity pays off. Mr. Bitgood timed museum visitors reading a 150word label and the same text divided into three 50-word panels. More than twice as many visitors read the shorter panels.

“Breaking down a long text passage into shorter ones changes the perception of the task, making it seem easier,” Mr. Bitgood wrote in an email. He likened labels to formal education. “If you break down a long chapter into smaller units and give a test for each unit, students do much better,” he said.

John Russick, director of curatorial affairs at the Chicago History Museum and coordinator of the annual label-writing competition by the American Alliance of Museums (winners get online accolades, not plaques), notices more experimental entries, including limericks and poems. To complement a portrait of the painter Waldo Peirce (who looked like Ulysses S. Grant), the de Young Museum in San Francisco published a poem by Ben Erickson, a fourth grader: Paint me sitting On a wooden bench Holding a cane Paint me with a dull brown Overcoat and a turquoise sweater Paint me with a yellow hand Resting on a wine red hat Paint me betraying No emotion

The writer Joseph Dresch and the editor Eugene Dillenburg of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History were among last year’s winners for a collection of clever labels illuminating “The Secret Life of Birds,” a recent exhibition. The labels deliver insights about mallards, kingfishers and other birds. The label for quail — titled “This Bird Knows What Women Want” — reveals that males “attract their mates by quickly offering up bits of food. Called Tidbitting, the ritual is something of a race, with the fastest male often winning the female.”

In “This Bird Is Not a Registered Trademark,” viewers learn that marketers — specifically of “a certain fruit-flavored breakfast cereal” — often rely on toucans to brand products. “This mascot bird is so recognizable that when the Mayan Archaeology Initiative used it in their logo, Kellogg threatened to sue,” the label reads. “The case was soon dropped, perhaps because it was just too silly.”

Mr. Chan of the Cooper Hewitt previously worked at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, one of the first to install Quick Response codes on labels, which provide visitors with smartphone access to an archive of information.

“We did it as an experiment and, of course, it failed,” Mr. Chan acknowledged. The codes now require a reader app, and many visitors resisted downloading it. “And that barrier is just too high for the casual person,” Mr. Chan said.

Learning from his mistake, Mr. Chan and his team at the Cooper Hewitt designed “the label whisperer,” software that enables visitors to snap a photo of a label and email it to an address, which then sends back the object’s collection records.

Visitors to the Cooper Hewitt, which reopened in December after a renovation lasting more than three years, will be able to borrow a pen, like a stylus, that interacts with Near-Field Communication technology incorporated into labels. “Behind each label there’s an N.F.C. tag,” Mr. Chan explained, “that allows you to basically collect objects as you walk around the galleries in a relatively straightforward way and then bring them back to explore on large interactive tables.”

Some museum directors view traditional labels as intrusive and would not object to a funeral for the so-called tombstones. In 2013, the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts staged a label-free exhibition of paintings by old masters. Instead, the museum set up iPad stations that focused on individual paintings and printed guides listing basic information, like the title, the artist’s name and the date it was acquired.

Trained docents and museum guards milled about to act as truly interactive labels and provoke discussions with visitors about the art.

“Our ultimate goal in removing labels from the gallery walls was to create a deeper museum experience,” said the museum’s director, Matthias Waschek, by email. “We want our visitors to slow down and experience the art on their own terms.” The digitization of museums, he added, means that the landscape for labels “may be changing more radically than most of us dare to think.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/arts/artsspecial/labels-digital-includedassume-new-importance-at-museums.html

Museums Seek to Lure, Then Lock In, Teenage Connoisseurs

By Robin Pogrebin The New York Times March 17, 2015 Walking past Ghirlandaio’s “Old Man With a Young Boy” at the Louvre over Christmas break, I listened as my 18-year-old son, Ethan, explained how the artist was among the first to portray eye contact within a portrait; how Leonardo used the color blue to convey distance; how Raphael was a favorite of the Medicis. At the Musée d’Orsay, I watched as my 16-year-old daughter, Maya, dragged Ethan over to Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” — a painting they had both studied — and then debated its merits.

It wasn’t pride I felt so much as relief. Not only have my kids apparently absorbed what they learned in high school art history class, but they have also come to realize how engrossing museums can be. It looks as if they’ll be museumgoers when they grow up.

Museums have become compelling to them rather than compulsory.

In a way, it’s easiest to take children to a museum when they’re too young to object. Once they become consumed by sports activities and phone screens, cultural organizations

can be a tough sell. But seeing art with teenagers, or having them discover it on their own, is one of those parental milestones that make the heart swell.

It’s good to introduce the museumgoing habit early, even though visits will inevitably be cut short by weary legs, growling stomachs and limited attention spans. And it’s always a good idea to start with museums that offer eye candy, like the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, with its annual train show, or hands-on opportunities, like the Children’s Museum of Manhattan or the New York Hall of Science in Queens.

Museums have increasingly caught on to the idea that they need to lock in their visitors earlier. While they have long offered children’s programs — come for cookies and collage! — institutions all over the country are now devoting far more creative resources to targeting teenagers.

A 2014 survey of 220 museums by the Association of Art Museum Directors found that about a third had docent programs for teenagers, or teenage councils.Research by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance shows that children’s attendance at cultural institutions in southeastern Pennsylvania has risen by 17 percent since 2009 and now accounts for more than three million visits annually.

Such efforts result not only from museums’ efforts to build patronage but also from their desire to make their institutions more up-to-date and accessible. “Teens are an important audience,” said Emily Schreiner, associate curator of education for family and community learning at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The goal is not necessarily numbers through the door as it is a very gradual cultural shift, as people from all walks of life feel that they belong in the museum.”

The Philadelphia Museum recently set up a Teen Ambassador Group comprising 10 people who come to the museum every other week for a year to work on programming for their peers, culminating in an art exhibition. “By dint of our architecture and our location, there is an intimidation factor,” Ms. Schreiner said, referring to the museum’s imposing columns and lofty downtown site. “We want to break down those barriers to entry while still celebrating what we have to offer. We want to have teens helping to engage their community rather than us adults programming for them and hoping they show up.”

Similar examples abound: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, all have some form of teenage council in which students learn about the museum, meet with staff members and sometimes give tours to people in their age group. Last year the Jewish Museum started offering free eight-year memberships to 13-year-olds who are recent bar or bat mitzvahs.

Some museums have tried to attract teenagers with a more laid-back social atmosphere.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum invites students to visit the galleries after hours over the course of five weeks; at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 15 teenage interns help plan an “After Dark” night for others their age. This month the Art Institute of Chicago invited 100 teenagers to spend 24 hours at the museum reimagining aspects of its operations, like the security officers’ uniforms and gallery benches. (The event also featured a midnight dance party, a caffeine bar and sunrise yoga.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Teens Take the Met!” evening, in which dozens of cultural institutions also took part, attracted about 3,000 people, ages 13 through 18, for activities like designing a tote bag, making sculpture or dancing to a D.J. “We were

shocked by how many came out on a Friday night,” said Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the Met’s chairman of education. “Young people need engaging creative spaces where they can be various parts of themselves.”

Some programs for teenagers are more overtly educational. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington teaches public high school students about Holocaust history through a 14-week training course in the spring.

The New-York Historical Society has a Sunday morning program for high school students in which they pursue research themes with scholars like Eric Foner and Kenneth T. Jackson, of Columbia University, or the longtime Washington power broker Vernon Jordan. Mr. Foner assigned the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address to prepare students for a discussion on Lincoln.

Last fall the Museum of Modern Art started its second online course on the New York art scene for teenagers. (The first included trips to Brooklyn artists’ studios.) In Washington, the National Gallery of Art arranged for about 60 local teenagers to investigate El Greco’s work with Brian Baade, a conservator who teaches at the University of Delaware, in tandem with its recent retrospective on that artist. At the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the artist Barbara Kruger is working with high school juniors and seniors on a public-art project that addresses social justice, identity, race and gender.

In some cases, museums have lured young people with inventive technology. At the newly refurbished Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan, for example, teenagers have been particularly attracted to the Immersion Room, which allows visitors to design their own wallpaper and project it on the walls.

From a mini music video to photo shoots with friends, teenagers have shared images created in this space, especially on Instagram. “The new @cooperhewitt design museum in Manhattan, New York, is basically the unofficial #selfie museum,” one said, adding, “This place is so. much. fun.”

Even as my kids got older, I made a point of seeking out installations with some element of spectacle, like the Guggenheim Museum’s 2008 Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective — featuring ascendant wolves and seven suspended white sedans — or its 201112 Maurizio Cattelan show, a virtual explosion of life-size wax human effigies and taxidermied animals floating throughout the rotunda. The Guggenheim building, of course, is a draw in itself because of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling architecture — I love how my daughter has come to casually refer to it as the Gugg.

I also remember the fun of taking my son on the No. 7 subway line to Queens for Katrin Sigurdardottir’s 2006 installation “High Plane V” at MoMA PS1, an Arctic topography of floating ice floes viewed by climbing a ladder and sticking your head through a hole. And at the Whitney Museum of American Art last summer, Ethan and I enjoyed pondering Jeff Koons’s plexiglass-encased vacuum cleaners, or what happens when his floating basketballs start to deflate.

Then there was our 2012 family outing to MoMA in Midtown to see Martha Rosler’s “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale,” where you could actually buy things. Maya made an offer on an oversize ceramic artichoke and got a real art-world lesson: It was out of her price range.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/arts/artsspecial/museums-seek-to-lure-thenlock-in-teenage-connoisseurs.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/arts/design/renovating-the-cooper-hewitt-national-designmuseum.html?_r=0

Gifts for the Home

By Julie Lasky New York Times December 1, 2014

A votive holder with a fox tail, a kit that lets you grow your own moss garden and a blanket that goes with an exposed brick wall (and many other dÊcor elements) are just a few of the items, in three price categories, that we offer in this year’s gift guide.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/multimedia/2014-holiday-giftguide.html?_r=0#page/home

November 25, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/science/science-events-minimalist-music-and-a-spotlight-on-sex.html?_r=0

November 21, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/arts/design/renewed-interest-for-lockwood-de-forests-designs.html

Sunday, October 26, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/arts/artsspecial/the-met-and-other-museums-adapt-to-thedigital-age.html?_r=0

On the Lewis and Clark Trail

By Maira Kalman The New York Times September 21, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/19/travel/muse-maira-kalman-lewis-and-clarktrail.html?_r=0

September 12, 2014

By Eve Kahn

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/arts/design/casting-the-glow-of-tiffany-far-andwide.html?_r=0

Sunday, September 7, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/arts/design/fall-arts-preview-prehistoric-tools-to-matisse-cut-outs.html

Postalco Launches Accessories Bearing the Art of Alexander Calder

By Su Wu New York Times T Magazine December 12, 2014

Alexander Calder may be best known for his kinetic mobiles, but the sculptor himself was also in constant motion. His oeuvre suggests an attention that shifted effortlessly across art and objects — from elaborate stage sets to jewelry worn by intellectual icons such as Simone de Beauvoir and Georgia O’Keeffe. Now, a capsule collection by the Tokyo-based stationer Postalco highlights the artist’s graphic work, in the form of embossed travel wallets and a spiral notebook punctuated by Calder’s own sketches and jottings. One quote, from 1951, seems to offer advice for how one might fill the

interspersed blank pages: “That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.”

Launched in Tokyo at the Postalco flagship against a backdrop of Calder’s short films, the inspiring accessories are available stateside starting today in the gift shop at the newly reopened Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. In goatskin and pressed canvas, the 15-item collaboration is intended to “not only instill a deeper understanding of Calder, but also enrich the quotidian experience,” says Alexander S. C. Rower, the director of the Calder Foundation and Calder’s grandson. “My grandfather approached the world with boundless curiosity. He did not prioritize between art and the utilitarian.”

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/alexander-calder-accessories-postalco/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/hunting-for-the-origins-of-symbolic-thought.html?_r=0

Sunday, September 7, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/04/arts/fall-arts-preview-times-100calendar.html?_r=0#reopening-of-cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum

Museum & Gallery Listings for Jan. 2-8 New York Times January 1, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/02/arts/design/museum-gallery-listings-for-jan-2-8.html?_r=0

December 11, 2014

http://www.wsj.com/articles/cooper-hewitt-director-caroline-baumann-plans-to-raise-museumsprofile-with-reopening-1418241498

Visitors to Play Designer at New Cooper-Hewitt

By Lucy Feldman The Wall Street Journal June 17, 2014

The Great Hall in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum James Rudnick/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

A pen is the last thing visitors to the new Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum would expect to be handed when they walk in the door.

But when the museum reopens on Dec. 12, every visitor will be handed a digital tool shaped like a pen to pick out favorite pieces in the museum and experiment with interactive exhibits.

The pen is one of several new features announced today as part of the museum’s reopening.

After a $91 million capital and endowment campaign and three years of renovations, the museum, housed inside the Carnegie Mansion in New York, will reopen its doors with 60% more gallery space, 50% more education space and a new name: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Cooper-Hewitt has been associated with the Smithsonian since it was acquired in 1967, and the new name reflects that history, museum officials said. With the added gallery space, the museum will dedicate its entire second floor to showcasing its permanent collection of more than 200,000 items and will maintain visiting hours through exhibition changes.

Visitors looking to play designer—a feature the museum promised during its renovations—will discover displays that include new technologies, opportunities for experiential learning and enhanced areas in which to rest, ponder and marvel.

Here are five things to look for: 1. An Interactive ‘Pen’

Every visitor to Cooper Hewitt will receive an interactive “pen” to let visitors “collect and create,” said director Caroline Baumann. The pen-shaped digital tool is originally modeled after a wand used for inventory control in healthcare. It will allow visitors to collect favorite pieces viewed in the museum into a personal online account, which can be accessed after leaving Carnegie Mansion and upon returning. Conceptualized as a pen in order to evoke the creative process, the tool provides the opportunity for anyone to “play designer,” Baumann said. An added benefit: It will also keep visitors away from their cellphones, said Seb Chan, director of Digital & Emerging Technologies .

2. The Process Lab In what Ms. Baumann described as a new “primer” to the museum, visitors will experience firsthand the process of design in a new Process Lab. Visitors can engage with “design thinking”—the creative process utilized by designers— through a series of activities based in four categories: defining problems, getting ideas, prototyping and testing and refining, said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design. One activity will involve manipulating light displayed through armatures with different materials like transparent, colored or perforated filters. The museum’s first dedicated education space open to the public, the lab aims to make visitors feel like they “own” the museum, said Caroline Payson, director of education. Even if people are unfamiliar with the museum’s offerings, they’ll be able to relate to the works after experimenting personally with the designer’s way of thinking.

3. The Immersion Room Visitors will be able to access and experience Cooper Hewitt’s wallpaper collection in an entirely new way. Two perpendicular floor-to-ceiling screens will line the walls, and using their museum pens on a digital table, visitors will select wallpapers from the collection to display. And they’ll watch their own designs appear in real time as they draw directly onto the table.

4. Resting Grounds The renovations have also added new garden space to enhance the museum experience. Neighbors and early arrivers will enjoy a 200-seat garden cafe open to the public before the museum welcomes visitors each morning. Inside the mansion, the original conservatory, previously used as an exhibition space, will become a dedicated seating area with views overlooking the bridge gallery and garden.

5. Original Details Cooper Hewitt also focused on preserving the original design details of its home. Ms. Cisneros attributed much of the renovation’s three-year duration to the attention paid to conserving the mansion’s integrity and special qualities.

Workers cleaned the wood features in rooms like the former Carnegie library, soon to become the “Process Lab,” with Q-tips and water. In an effort to both accommodate a new freight elevator and maintain the structure of the historic building, hidden hinge-systems have been incorporated into the woodwork. The first floor features a “secret” pivoting door, weighing 2,000 pounds, that will lay flat behind a visitor service desk by day and swing open to accommodate shipments by night.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/06/17/visitors-to-play-designer-at-new-cooper-hewitt/

September 9, 2014

http://online.wsj.com/articles/bloomberg-philanthropies-gives-museums-17-million-push-towarddigital-1410226243?mod=_newsreel_2

November 22-23, 2014

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-wsj-on-the-six-best-art-books-to-give-for-the-holidays-1416608488

September 20-21, 2014

http://online.wsj.com/articles/35-new-yorkers-share-their-fall-arts-entertainment-picks-1411078936

Cooper Hewitt design museum reopens, revamped

By Katherine Roth Associated Press December 9, 2014

NEW YORK (AP) — The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, revamped, restored and expanded after a three-year closure, is reopening at last, all decked out for the 21st century in its historic Carnegie Mansion home just a few blocks up Fifth Avenue from the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Visitors to the museum, which opens Friday (Dec. 12), will be hard-pressed to recognize the old-fashioned, somewhat wonky entity of old. It's now four stories of cutting-edge galleries, hands-on and community-friendly.

The spacious garden, adjoining cafĂŠ and gift shop, housed in Andrew Carnegie's 19th century picture gallery, will be accessible from a 90th Street gate and open to the public at no charge.

Inside, ticket-holders should come ready to experience a new kind of museum straddling art and science, 19th century architecture and a 21st-century Jetsons sort of world, where 3-D designs can be downloaded and hundreds of wallpaper patterns can be viewed (or designed) at the touch of a finger. Visitors are invited to use the museum as a practical design resource and exploration center as much as a museum in the traditional sense.

"I can't wait to see how people make use of this," said museum director Caroline Baumann, stepping gingerly around multi-touch surfaces the size of billiard tables, contemporary design pieces and even some antique French furniture. "It really makes the heart soar."

With 60 percent more gallery space than it had before, the Cooper Hewitt opens with 10 new shows at once, making use of all four floors.

On the ground floor, "Designing the New Cooper Hewitt" recounts the museum's transformation, which involved 12 design teams and took a decade to realize.

The first floor features a "Process Lab" with an industrial-size 3-D printer, among other tools.

The lab invites visitors to explore the process of problem-solving behind design.

A "Beautiful Users" exhibit includes pitchers, wheelchairs and other objects from daily life, examining the shift toward user-oriented design.

A quick climb up one more staircase and the juxtaposition of traditional and cutting-edge really starts to take flight. "Making Design" brings together a wide range of works from the museum's permanent collection, while "Hewitt Sisters Collect" tells the story of Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt and their collections of textiles, hatboxes, wall coverings, furniture and even birdcages (notice the sound of chirping birds), among other decorative arts.

Elsewhere, an Immersion Room allows visitors access to the Cooper Hewitt's extensive collection of wall coverings and projects them, full-scale, onto the walls.

The third floor, formerly closed to the public and now transformed into a 6,000-square-foot gallery, features the exhibit "Tools: Extending Our Reach." Highlights include a walk-through installation composed of dozens of hammers, saws and other basic tools, suspended so they appear to be exploding, and a 24-hour, delayed live feed of the sun's surface, courtesy of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts — an illustration of the power of complex tools like satellites and telescopes. The exhibit is reminiscent at times of what you might expect from a science museum.

The final elements of the museum's transformation will be added this spring when seating and terraces are added to the garden, an "evolved version" of the 1902 original, and each museum visitor will be loaned an interactive "pen."

The grippy black stylus, around 8 inches long, can be used to doodle or design on any of the generously sized multi-touch tables throughout the museum; to locate specific items in the collection (doodling a zigzag pattern, for example, brings up all items with a zigzag in their design); or to download background material.

A unique Web address on each entry ticket lets the visitor download material to be accessed later online.

As for the mansion itself, the detailed, teak-veneer parquet floors have been replaced by century-old teak in the same seven patterns that Carnegie installed. The Caldwell light fixtures — one of the earliest types of electrical lighting in the city — are gleaming again. And multiple layers of paint have been removed to reveal the ornately carved, Caen limestone, arched ceiling just inside the 91st Street entrance.

"This was one of the first homes in the world to have air conditioning, heating and an elevator system, really cutting-edge technologies of the time," Baumann said. "Andrew Carnegie would be pleased if he could see it today." ___ The Cooper Hewitt museum, on Fifth Avenue between 90th and 91st Streets, will be open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and New Year's Day, starting Dec. 12. Hours are 10 a.m.6 p.m. Sunday through Friday, and 10 a.m.-9 p.m. on Saturdays. The garden will be open to the public from 7:30 a.m.-7 p.m. (9 p.m. on Saturdays). Admission is $18 for adults, $12 for seniors and students. Children under 18 are free. Saturday evenings are "pay as you wish." www.CooperHewitt.org

This photo provided by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum shows the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum viewed from East 91st Street in New York. The Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, revamped, restored and seriously expanded after a three-year closure, is reopening at last, all decked out for the 21st century within its historic Carnegie Mansion home. It opens to visitors Friday, Dec. 12, 2014.(AP Photo/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

This photo provided by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum shows the installation view of “Hewitt Sisters Collect� at the museum in New York. The Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, revamped, restored and seriously expanded after a three-year closure, is reopening at last, all decked out for the 21st century within its historic Carnegie Mansion home. It opens to visitors Friday, Dec. 12, 2014. (AP Photo/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

This photo provided by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum shows visitors viewing the installation rendering of “Beautiful Users” at the museum in New York. The Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, revamped, restored and seriously expanded after a three-year closure, is reopening at last, all decked out for the 21st century within its historic Carnegie Mansion home. It opens to visitors Friday, Dec. 12, 2014. (AP Photo/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

This photo provided by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum shows the-installation view of “Tools: Extending Our Reach” featuring Controller of the Universe by Damián Ortega and Solar Wall at the museum in New York. The Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, revamped, restored and seriously expanded after a three-year closure, is reopening at last, all decked out for the 21st century within its historic Carnegie Mansion home. It opens to visitors Friday, Dec. 12, 2014. (AP Photo/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

This photo provided by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum shows the installation view: Making Design, inside the museum in New York. The Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, revamped, restored and seriously expanded after a three-year closure, is reopening at last, all decked out for the 21st century within its historic Carnegie Mansion home. It opens to visitors Friday, Dec. 12, 2014. (AP Photo/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

This photo provided by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum shows the Cooper-Hewitt campus in New York.

The Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, revamped, restored and seriously expanded after a three-year closure, is reopening at last, all decked out for the 21st century within its historic Carnegie Mansion home. It opens to visitors Friday, Dec. 12, 2014. (AP Photo/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c0a0be5cb2064cb48c4432fcfe62dc90/cooper-hewitt-design-museumreopens-revamped

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What are design museums actually for?

By Edwin Heathcote Financial Times September 26, 2014

Museu del Disseny in Barcelona

This is boom time for design museums. New York, London, Barcelona, Hong Kong – each city is building or rebuilding huge new institutions dedicated to design. But what are they going to fill them with? Surely, everything in our lives has been designed? Our phones and tablets, the web pages we access on them, our clothes, cars, watches, the street furniture and shop windows we pass by without noticing, the street itself and the buildings that define it – we are overwhelmed by design. So are these going to be museums of everything? What, really, is a design museum for?

A century and a half ago, the design museum (or “museum of applied arts” as it was then) was a revolutionary didactic idea. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s first such museum, emerged in 1852 from the profits of the 1851 Great Exhibition. This vast bazaar of the world’s manufactured goods – presaging the World Expo – was an attempt to display the fruits of Britain’s industrial revolution, its empire and its wealth, while gently acknowledging the rest of the world. It attracted 6m people (a third of the British population) but it also appalled others including William Morris and Henry Cole who were repelled by the excess and decorative frenzy of the fruits of an exploding consumerism.

The V&A was their response, an educational exhibition of good design from which both taste and technique could be learnt. Its parallel exhibition is, by the way, often forgotten. The insatiable Victorian appetite for outrage ensured that the Gallery of False Principles in Design (dubbed the Chamber of Horrors) proved far more popular than the more worthy exhibits.

Taste was always at the heart of the design museum. New York’s MoMA (founded in 1929, days after the Wall Street crash) was a true modernist museum, embodying the Bauhaus ideal of presenting art with design as a single, continuous expression of the zeitgeist. Machine parts were presented alongside murals. It was an effort by its founder, Alfred Barr, to elevate design to the level of art, which the museum still aspires to but which has never quite gelled in the public consciousness.

MoMA’s kind of prescriptive, exemplar didacticism may be unfashionable today. But the explosion of design museums around the world indicates that design is being taken as seriously as when Henry Cole established the V&A. London is creating a new Design Museum in the midcentury modernist shell of the former Commonwealth Institute in Kensington. Hong Kong is building the M+, an ambitious MoMA-style museum in which art and design will be shown together. Barcelona is currently installing its huge (and rather ugly) Museu del Disseny in the emerging and incoherent Poblenou district. The V&A recently completed its Clothworkers’ Centre, a vast, publicly accessible archive of objects, and is planning a new institution on the former London Olympics site. And in New York, the CooperHewitt Museum is finishing off an ambitious reworking of its fin-de-siècle building on the city’s Museum Mile.

But what will fill all these buildings? Haven’t we all seen enough chairs and iPhones? How do you fill a museum with websites and apps? And why would you?

I asked Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum, why he was confident that there would be an appetite for his new building in a digital age. “There is a hunger for shared physical experience,” he replies. “With a museum you can attract an audience far bigger than with a publication – it’s about more than Twitter followers.” Sudjic was himself a newspaper critic and he points out that most of the younger generation of design curators have, perhaps surprisingly, come from a media background. His intimation is that the real influence lies in museums rather than in print. “You can compare it to music,” he continues. “Music sales have fallen off a cliff – but festivals are booming.”

The Design Museum caused a minor furore recently when it acquired for its collection an AK-47.

MoMA famously has a policy not to acquire objects that are designed to do harm. “I think now we’re less given to manifestos,” Sudjic says in defence of the acquisition. “Maybe it’s not so helpful to say ‘this is good or bad.’ ” Certainly the AK-47 is among the most recognisable and, in its way, effective 20th-century designs. But is there still a moral imperative?

The V&A’s Kieran Long, another journalist-turned-curator, provoked a similar debate when his department acquired the first working 3D-printed gun, a perfect example of the subversive potential of distributed manufacturing. Here was an open-source weapon that could be downloaded and assembled in a bedroom. Long’s creation of the V&A’s Rapid Response Collecting is a journalist’s riposte to the often glacial pace of museum programming, allowing the institution to acquire and display objects at short notice, responding to news events. For example, there is a pair of cargo trousers made at Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza factory before it collapsed last year, killing more than 1,100 workers. The trousers themselves are generic but they are in the museum to illustrate a story about where our clothes come from, about social conditions and the global interconnectedness of things.

These objects sit deliberately awkwardly among the Ming vases and Mackintosh chairs, but they also indicate a trend towards curators acquiring products that have precipitated new events rather than artefacts of finery that bear little relation to everyday life.

Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at MoMA, tells me, “I’m most proud of having acquired the ‘@’ sign.” Acquired? “Well, ‘anointed’ might be a better word,” she says. “Of course, we don’t actually possess it, it’s everywhere, but that’s an advantage – it’s as if the sharing economy had entered the museum.” Despite MoMA’s historic opposition to the acquisition of tools of destruction, Antonelli recently made waves with an intriguing, mostly online project, dedicated to the confluence between design and violence. “You use objects as a lens to understand something about the world,” she says.

Uptown from MoMA, at the mansion built for himself by robber-baron-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, work is finishing at the Smithsonian’s museum of design, the CooperHewitt. The museum’s director, Caroline Baumann, agrees with Antonelli.

“For instance,” she says “we have Abraham Lincoln’s watch at the Smithsonian, the one he was wearing when he was assassinated.

We’ve worked with a musician who’s turned its ticking into music. What we’re trying to get across is that this is all design – the watch, the music, dance, the museum . . .”

Baumann has some of the proselytising zeal of MoMA’s founders. “Design is the answer to the world’s problems!” she says optimistically. But she is also extremely keen to extend the institution’s influence beyond its own walls. Baumann’s team developed a digital pen that allows visitors to scan the items they’re interested in and create a list to take home with them, to be investigated at leisure.

“The pen becomes a tool to expand the understanding of design and allows the visitor to think like a designer and to curate and collect themselves.”

Aric Chen, curator of design and architecture at Hong Kong’s M+, has a different task to the other directors and curators. He needs to situate a new design collection in an Asian context, on an island with only the feeblest tradition of museum culture. The plans for the West Kowloon building are stunning: a podium, slab and concrete pit from the Swiss architects of London’s Tate Modern, Herzog & De Meuron. “What we’re interested in,” Chen tells me, “is where visual art, design and moving image intersect, the fluidities between them and where design begins to bleed into other disciplines. So with architecture, for instance, we’re interested, of course, in the milestone buildings but also in the mediation of architecture as part of a broader visual culture.”

This is not an Asian collection, he stresses, but one seen from an Asian perspective. “We’re looking at the designs that have played such a huge role in the industrial and economic rise of east Asia. Things like the Sony Walkman or Aibo, the Sony robot dog.” I ask about that other great Asian design tradition – copying. “Oh yeah,” Chen replies, “we’re determined to tackle copying. It’s been demonised but you could also argue that copying is a foundation of civilisation. In the era of open source and the internet we can now understand copying as a generative and creative act.”

“There’s this word shanzhai, the phenomenon of pirated goods. In many cases these [copies] represent quite a creative process, with improvements on the originals.”

Another aspect of the collection are the neon signs that were so characteristic of Hong Kong’s streetscape, crowdsourcing peoples’ favourite remaining signs and mapping them. That interest in the local in an international context is an effective way of anchoring a design museum in which the danger is that the exhibitions become indistinguishable from a global retail offer. He is, for example, building a collection of designers in a western tradition who were influenced by Asia – Charlotte Perriand, Ettore Sottsass and others – objects that illuminate refreshing new angles on global culture, allowing us to see familiar designs in a new light.

Back at the V&A, Long suggests that the design museum needs to become part of the civic realm in a very radical way. “We need to become a department of public life,” he says. “The V&A is part of the democratic infrastructure of the country. The museum exists in a privileged realm of freedom, with space to think. When the public realm – libraries, public space, the rights to protest, feel like they are under threat, we need to think how we open ourselves up as a civic space. For the next election, for instance, we’ll set up a polling booth in the museum. Next year we’re doing a big exhibition, All this belongs to you.”

V&A director Martin Roth seems to have brought the former journalist in as a kind of provocateur. “At the moment,” he tells me over a Sunday morning coffee, “curators are seen as being at the top of a hierarchy. This must stop. We have to open all this knowledge to the public.

We need to use technology, digital tools, robots in the storerooms, learn from how commercial

companies handle their stock. Museums are very far behind. At the moment, if you are a museum director and you know how to operate a mobile phone you’re seen as a superstar.”

Roth is animated about the future of the museum.

“There are three issues facing a design museum today,” he says. “First is the question of how you avoid it looking like a furniture store; how is it different to a typical bourgeois living room? Second is the problem of the inflation of design. Is it craft or is it a philosophy? Or is it lifestyle? Is everything digital part of design? Design isn’t everything and the perception that it is, is confusing and damaging to the museum.

And third . . .”

He pauses, I’m not sure whether for dramatic effect or if he’s considering if he should tell me this, “ . . . is the quality of contemporary art – which is 95 per cent rubbish.”

I raise my eyebrows over my coffee cup. “The hyper-currency of art, the plutocrats’ purchases, these things corrupt the relationship between art and design at the same institution. They affect the future of the design museum and I worry that as contemporary art runs out of ideas it will need fresh blood . . .” He makes a theatrical sucking noise “ . . . and they will come to design.”

So is he pessimistic? “If you don’t collect design today you are a history museum – you are making a mistake,” he says. “I think design will have more influence in more museums but perhaps not so much in dedicated museums.”

“Design tells so many stories,” he says. “I’m always asked what my favourite object in the collection is. It’s a banal question but we have the actual chair that the famous Christine Keeler photo was taken on. It’s a cheap fake of the Arne Jacobsen design. But we also have an original of the chair, and we have the original photo. It’s a story about politics, society, scandal and sex.

You can explain the whole world of the 1960s in three objects.”

And in what other type of museum could you do that?

Photographs: Lourdes Jansana, Lewis Morley Archive/National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum

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Cooper Hewitt design museum’s artful renovation matches mansion to mission

By Philip Kennicott Washington Post November 30, 2014

What is now the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt design museum was once Andrew Carnegie’s home. A renovation has added exhibit space and made it a better showcase for design’s evolution. (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

NEW YORK — Since 1976, the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt museum in New York has been housed in one of the most glorious mansions from the city’s most glorious age of wealth and extravagance, the 1902 home of Andrew Carnegie. And the problem has always been: It’s the wrong kind of glory.

The mansion was given to the Smithsonian by the Carnegie Corporation, the charitable organization established by the steel magnate, to house a collection of objects that has never quite seemed at home amidst the opulence and grandeur of the neo-Georgian stone and brick pile on Fifth Avenue. The mansion is locked in a particular past, full of wood paneling, stained glass, carved ceilings and even a themed room full of ornately detailed Indian teakwood. The collection, however, is an ongoing study in design evolution, spanning centuries, but fundamentally preoccupied with ideas of innovation and contemporary problem solving. How do you display iPhones, designer furniture, state-of-the-art wheelchairs and the latest in thermostat technology in a building that feels more Downton Abbey than Silicon Valley?

On Dec. 12, the Cooper Hewitt will unveil its latest effort to make its capacious home more amenable to its basic mission, an $81 million project to renovate, refurbish and rethink the design center for the future. Exhibit space has been increased by 60 percent; new cases have been designed by the go-to firm

of Diller Scofidio + Renfro; a new public staircase and freight elevator have been added; all systems and amenities have been updated, including a cafe and book store; and exhibit designers have reconceived the display of the entire collection, including a much buzzed-about new “pen” that allows visitors to download exhibit information and interact with digital tables, creating a unique online record of their visit.

Visitors will notice one major change immediately upon entering the mansion’s main hall on the first floor. To the left a visitor services desk, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, has an aerodynamic sleekness, and soft lines distinctly at odds with the coffered ceiling and oak woodwork all around it. But for all its pleasing dissonance, it is a minimal intervention: Whenever necessary, including during large social functions, the entire desk can be slid back behind an enormous 2,000-pound “secret” door discreetly hidden in the paneled wall. This prominent detail sets a pattern for the rest of the redesign: Wherever possible, the old home feels like an ornate frame that contains an intriguing but ephemeral sense of the contemporary.

Most of the mansion’s two main floors, including much of the space used by Carnegie and his family in the regular course of life, retain their historical character. Display cases have been cleverly designed not to block windows, and signage and text have been carefully fitted into the sumptuous interior without seeming discordant or disrespectful. What’s new feels more like a self-conscious overlay of contemporary design rather than an effort to finesse some kind of hybrid mix of new and old. As one former curator said of an earlier attempt to make peace with the mansion, “The house had such a big presence. The more you fought it, the more it disagreed with you.” The current redesign, led

by Gluckman Mayner Architects with Beyer Blinder Belle assisting with preservation and historic issues, feels about as right as they are likely to get it. The space remains historic without being static, and there’s more coexistence than fighting between the house and the collection.

An artist’s rendering of the redesigned interior of the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt design museum. (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

Less apparent to visitors, but essential to the ongoing vitality of the museum, are improvements to its basic function. Before the latest renovation, the museum was often compelled to close to visitors while installing new exhibits. Without a freight elevator, large objects were brought in and out through the front door, so the museum simply went dark during those days. Now it is equipped to stay open while curators swap out old exhibits for new. By moving collection storage to a facility in New Jersey, the museum has also gained some 7,000 square feet of new exhibit space. The second floor has been turned

over entirely to showing pieces from the permanent collection while the third floor, formerly a library, is now an open and attractive gallery with 6,000 square feet for temporary exhibits.

The reopening of the museum will also mark the opening of 10 new exhibits and installations, including a “process room” that is designed to introduce visitors to basic design concepts and thinking and to pose questions that will structure their experience of the museum.

A visit late last month, while work crews and curators were racing to put the finishing touches on the interior and exhibits, revealed a Cooper Hewitt better positioned to compete with other institutions on Fifth Avenue’s museum mile, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, just a few blocks south. The main third-floor exhibition hall, the museum’s first open-plan exhibit space, is given over to a show called simply “Tools: Extending Our Reach.” The show includes material from the Cooper Hewitt collection as well from nine other Smithsonian museums and collections. It was ambitious of the curators to attempt an exhibit that borrows so widely across other Smithsonian entities, but the results are worth it.

The space is large enough that the designers and curators are able to make both aesthetic and didactic statements, and so among the many objects, ranging over some 1.85 million years of history, is an installation of a sculpture by Damian Ortega, called “Controller of the Universe.” Borrowed from a private collection, the artwork consists of hand tools hung from the ceiling, as if they are bursting out from a center point like the Big Bang expanding the cosmos. If you stand at that center point, the effect is intoxicating: The tools seem to radiate power in all directions, flattering your own, and by extension humanity’s, sense of power over the world. But these are also sharp and potentially dangerous objects, and the feeling of power is double-edged.

It is an eclectic exhibit — full of patent models, drawings, electronic gimcracks, medical devices, spaceage wonders and high-end digital toys — and that eclecticism is part of the design museum’s charm. It can afford to be a little looser in its curatorial ideas, a little more associative in its thinking, than other museums. At the heart of its intellectual mission is the transmission of a fundamental connection between work and pleasure. A well-made tool changes the experience of any task it serves. A beautiful corkscrew makes the opening of a bottle of wine contiguous with the experience of drinking it.

The “Tools: Extending Our Reach” exhibit conveys that idea abundantly well. Indeed, it seems exactly the sort of show that would be happy to live, for a while, in the now-empty Arts and Industries Building next to the Smithsonian Castle, where connections between scientific innovation and aesthetic expression were regularly explored more than a century ago. As the Smithsonian contemplates future uses of the Arts and Industries Building, the renovation of the Cooper Hewitt may well provide useful data and direction. If nothing else, the Cooper Hewitt project demonstrates the feasibility of creating a fashionably modern museum within a historic building without undue compromise to either the past or the present.

Unfortunately, the much-vaunted digital pen that allows visitors deeper access to the collection and a record of their visit wasn’t available to play with last month. Museum officials said production difficulties, not design issues, were to blame, and that the pen would be available early next year. So nothing can be said of its effectiveness except this: Conceptually, it seems well intentioned. Museums, today, are increasingly overstuffed with technology designed to distract the visitor from the experience of objects. But if the pen works as promised, it can serve a higher function, to consolidate the learning experience after the visitor has left the museum.

Design is a seductive topic today. For many people in the developed world, basic ideas about innovation and progress are experienced primarily through the aesthetics and small improvements of everyday objects, especially our digital friends and helpmates, including phones, games and computers. In one context — the economic realm where creative destruction is no longer deemed a necessary evil but an end to be cherished in and of itself — innovation may mean the perpetual destruction of the past, the loss of livelihoods, the uprooting of families and the decimation of the middle class. But when it comes to consumer objects, the Janus-face of innovation is all smiles and blandishment. This seems to be the reason that capitalism still functions, despite its heavy cost to the family, the environment and social structures; no other system produces such beautiful toys.

So perhaps that long-standing sense that the Carnegie Mansion is an odd place for a design museum isn’t so odd after all. A plutocrat of the industrial age built this house, while in many ways it is our own appetite for consumer goods that has helped build the collection and keep it vital. Anyone visiting the mansion cannot help but wonder: What did it cost to build all of this? Which is a question we should all turn on the objects that make our lives slightly more delightful: What is the cost of all this stuff?

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Download latest app before the symphony The Washington Post

By Geoff Edgers October 31, 2014

Youngmoon Kim, a professor at Drexel University, helped develop the LiveNote app, which he uses Oct. 14 during a free college concert at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. (Michael Perez/For The Washington Post)

PHILADELPHIA — The symphony concert begins like any other, with lights dimmed, players in formal black and the conductor dashing to the podium.

That’s until composer Jennifer Higdon, whose work is being performed on this night, takes the Verizon Hall stage and delivers a directive she has never given before. “We encourage you,” she says with a smile, “to use your phone.”

This isn’t a practical joke aimed at the maestro. It’s the debut of LiveNote, an app the Philadelphia Orchestra has developed to encourage concertgoers to toggle along to the music on their smartphones.

The experiment at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts is meant to make the orchestra more accessible, particularly for the Facebook generation.

A half-century after museums rolled out the first audio guides, cultural institutions are working harder than ever — and spending more — to develop new ways to attract the next generation of arts consumers. The investment in technology, they concede, comes with some risk. What draws in newcomers might alienate the core audience, or those who don’t want to glance at a screen while gazing at Goya.

Mark Volpe, managing director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, faced that conflict this summer when the orchestra tried out a special “lawncast,” offering ticket-buyers the chance to follow a concert through screens that offered information on the performance as well as a “conductor cam.”

A screenshot of the LiveNote app created by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Drexel University. (Courtesy of Drexel University/Courtesy of Drexel University)

“There’s a generation or two out there, screens are a dominant part of their life, and if you’re going to communicate with those people, technology has got to be one of the levers,” Volpe said. “But the reality is, during the concert, there were people who had four machines in front of them. At a certain point, I couldn’t enjoy the music if I was trying to manage four different screens.”

Technology hard to avoid In concert halls, theaters and museums, changes don’t usually come easy. In 1983, when the New York City Opera began projecting English supertitles above the stage, James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, famously said they could be used “over my dead body.”

“I cannot imagine not wanting the audiences riveted on the performers and at every moment,” Levine said.

Ten years later, the Met installed its own system, on seatbacks, with concert attendees able to switch off subtitles if they preferred. These days, technology is hard to avoid. It enters every sphere, from emailed fundraising blasts to complicated stage projections.

Not even “The Nutcracker” is off-limits. This year, the Brooklyn Ballet raised money on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding Web site, to help create an interactive version of the holiday classic, complete with LEDaltered tutus.

At Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, the lobby is often packed with interactive tools, whether a recreated campaign headquarters to relate to a political drama on stage, to the Tweet seats, where theatergoers are encouraged to fire out a rolling commentary.

The Dallas Museum of Art offers a point system that visitors access by sending texts through smartphones, scoring everything from exhibition tickets to private tours in storage spaces usually hidden from the public.

Bloomberg Philanthropies gave $17 million to five institutions this year “to produce innovative projects . . . that use cutting edge technology and enable visitors to share content.”

Two of those ideas will soon spring to life. In December, when the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum re-opens in New York, visitors will be loaned a digital pen with a sensor that can read information on object tags. The pens can then be used at special tables with interactive screens inside the museum or to upload data for visitors to access at home.

A Brooklyn Museum project will merge technology to a new-styled help desk.

A small team of newly hired art historians will greet visitors, show them how to access a new app and then help them by answering questions as they move through the building.

The key, says Shelley Bernstein, the Brooklyn Museum’s vice director of digital engagement and technology, is not getting saddled with machinery. She proudly notes that the museum has only about a dozen iPads scattered throughout galleries.

“I do not think people want to be watching a movie while they’re looking at a painting,” she said. “It’s better to get them looking at the art.”

Apps available for concerts The days of musicians and artists locking themselves off from the public are largely gone. Today, violinists blog about their travel habits, and art conservators are put on display behind glass walls.

Just as in televised sports, where a lone center field camera has been supplanted by multiple angles and players wired for sound, cultural consumers have grown to expect to get backstage and behind-thescenes access to the creative process.

Mobile devices are one tool that can open those doors.

“It’s kind of anachronistic that we have all this technology, we use it, and the first thing we do when you come into a concert hall is ask you to turn it off,” said Youngmoo Kim, the associate engineering professor at Drexel University who helped develop LiveNote.

Classical concerts and cellphones have always had an uneasy relationship. Errant rings usually inspire the wrath of the conductor, some of whom have been known to stop the players to scold the violator.

And a 2004 experiment with handheld guides by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra was met with mixed reviews.

“The novices enjoyed the commentary the most,” said Kevin DuLuca, Pittsburgh’s director of information technology. “The people familiar with the works found it more distracting and didn’t want to be fiddling with the devices.”

But technology has advanced, so instead of having to distribute costly devices — the case in Pittsburgh — today’s orchestras can simply create an app for a user’s phone.

The live stream can also be restricted to certain parts of a concert venue, leaving tech-free sections for purists.

This July, the Boston Symphony Orchestra made its multiscreen performance of Dvorak available in a special, marked-off section of its summer home in Tanglewood.

Susan Hockfield, the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology president who leads the BSO’s media and technology committee, said she was thrilled to conduct the test. She’s just not sure how she felt about the screens.

“One of the reasons I go to concerts is for the intensity of the experience,” she said. “It almost feels like the air vibrates with the music. It’s an experience you don’t get at home, even with a fabulous sound system.”

In that spirit, the Philadelphia Symphony rolled out LiveNote not during a paid, subscription performance, but as a test during its free college night concert held every fall. The app, which offers a rolling commentary of historic nuggets and musical analysis, emerged after orchestra leaders noticed that students at this annual performance were already clicking around. Why not reach them where they scan?

“This isn’t about giving people something to do to occupy them in the hall,” said Jeremy Rothman, the Philadelphia Symphony’s vice president of artistic planning. “It’s about providing them information to appreciate the music.”

In Verizon Hall that Tuesday night, the music ranged from Leonard Bernstein to Rimsky-Korsakov, Strauss to Higdon’s “blue cathedral” tone poem.

According to the orchestra’s own figures, about 20 percent of the audience connected to the LiveNote stream. Others used their phones to take videos of the action — forbidden, but not enforced — or to text friends and post on Facebook.

Renata Skubutyte, a 30-year-old Temple University pharmaceutical student, learned about LiveNote from an e-mail from the symphony and downloaded it before entering the hall. Skubutyte goes to a few concerts a season and was eager to try out the new app.

When the lights went up, she gave it a mixed review.

“It’s a cool idea,” she said, “but a bit of a distraction. I would like to come without any gadgets next time and do it old-fashioned.”

Old-fashioned?

“Get the booklet and before the show starts, read about the major pieces,” Skubutyte said. “Then you enjoy and concentrate fully on the music.”

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Please Touch! Cooper Hewitt Creates A Museum For The Internet Age

By Laura Sydell NPR: All Tech Considered December 12, 2014

Interactive touch screens at the newly redesigned Cooper Hewitt museum let visitors sort through the catalog and create their own designs.

Cooper Hewitt

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City collects the beautiful and practical — vintage Eames chairs, Jimi Hendrix posters, Victorian bird cages.

The museum, which is housed in the Andrew Carnegie mansion, is reopening after an extensive $81 million, three-year renovation — and the redesign has turned this historic building into one of the most technologically advanced museums in the country.

It reopens on a special anniversary, says Cooper Hewitt Director Caroline Baumann. "On Dec. 12 in 1902, Andrew Carnegie actually arrived with his wife and daughter in a horse-drawn carriage," she says. "So we chose Dec. 12, 2014, for obvious reasons celebrating the new Cooper Hewitt the same date that Andrew Carnegie moved in."

This sprawling 64-room mansion, with its high ceilings and tall windows, was once on the leading edge of home innovation. "The Carnegie home was one of the first houses in New York City to have air conditioning and an early example of heating," Baumann says.

And now, she says, Cooper Hewitt is using this historic mansion to advance museum innovation.

In an age of social media, video games, and selfies, visitors are no longer content to be passive recipients of information, she says.

Bauman takes me to a second-floor gallery about the history of wallpaper. At a table with a big touch screen I can sort through hundreds of wallpaper designs — from antique floral French prints to contemporary abstract patterns. If I want to see what it would be like in a room, I tap the design and it's projected onto the walls.

"The idea was that people would better understand the impact of wallpaper by saying, 'Look what this can do to a room,' " she says.

Baumann says it could be a great way to inspire people who are looking to put wallpaper in their own home.

You can also design your own wallpaper here. Baumann draws a few shapes and they replicate across the wall. I add a dot and it looks like a wallpaper of bunny rabbits.

Visitors will use a penlike object designed by the museum to draw on this table. Each visitor will get one of the objects, which looks like an oversized black crayon, during his visit.

"It's also shaped like a pen because it gives visitors the explicit permission to go and do things," says Seb Chan, the museum's director of digital and emerging media. "It's like 'Hey, we've given you a pen.' 'What do I do with a pen? Oh! I create stuff. Right, obviously I'm here to create stuff.' " There are other touch screens in the museum where you can make a zigzag or a curlicue, and it brings up objects from the permanent collection that use that shape. Chen draws a circle and it pulls up a pen-and-ink drawing from 1736 with a trumpet in it.

Chan says most museums have their collections online, but visitors don't know how to begin to search through them. Using random drawings as a way to call up items can help them discover the collection.

The pen keeps a digital record of your visit. It will have the wallpaper you drew and and, if you tap an X symbol next to a display of, say, a turn-of-the-20th-century chair you find interesting, that will also be part of a personal account you can visit after you leave the museum.

"You can look at more information," Chan says. "You can share it with your friends. It's a memory device."

Many other museums are keeping an eye on Cooper Hewitt. Museums have been experimenting with handing out iPads to visitors and creating special apps with audio tours, but visitors often don't use them, says Nancy Proctor, deputy director of digital experiences at the Baltimore Museum of Art. "What's interesting about the pen is it's about as far away as you can get from an audio tour device," she says. "That's really exciting as an invitation to all of us in the museum field to kind of think outside that audio tour box."

Cooper Hewitt will now also have the ability to learn more about what gets visitors most excited in their collection. She says this is also important to attracting young donors — many of whom want proof that their money is making an impact.

Museums are also struggling to attract younger visitors. According to a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, museum attendance among young adults age 35 to 45 is declining.

Cooper Hewitt Director Baumann hopes that by making the experience more interactive, that will begin to change. "This renovation, the past three years, was really the lifetime opportunity for Cooper Hewitt to modernize, to renew, to become something new," she says.

The museum opens its doors Friday — though the new technology, including the pen, will continue to roll out over the next few weeks.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/12/12/370131943/please-touch-cooper-hewittcreates-a-museum-for-the-internet-age Public radio stations across the country aired the segment, including:  Huffduffer.com  KAJK 91.5, Aspen Public Radio (online)  KBIA 91.3, Mid-Missouri Public Radio (online)  KCUR 89.3, Kansas City Public Media, (online)  KRCC 91.5, Radio Colorado College (online)  KRWG 90.7, Public Media for Southwestern New Mexico and Far West Texas (online)  KSTX 89.1, Texas Public Radio (online)  KUNC 91.5, Community Radio for Northern Colorado (online)  KUOW 94.9, Seattle News & Information (online)  KVLU 91.3, Lamar University, Texas (online)  KQED 88.5, Public Media for Northern California (online)  Ideastream, Ohio (online)  McQsJazz.com  Usdaily.org  WAMU 88.5, American University Radio, Washington, D.C. (online)  WFUV 90.7, NY’s Music Discovery (online)  WLPR 89.1, Lakeshore Public Media, Indiana (online)  WSLU 89.5, North Country Public Radio, New York (online)

NPR’s Book Concierge: Our Guide To 2014’s Great Reads

By Heller McAlpin NPR December 3, 2014

Ah-Ha To Zig-Zag: 31 Objects From Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

By Maira Kalman

Maira Kalman's whimsical, sublimely silly alphabet book celebrates the newly renovated Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum by featuring 31 of her favorite objects from the collection — a quirky companion volume to My Favorite Things, her selection for adults. Flagged items include a medieval Egyptian cap and a 19th century English glazed earthenware poodle. Just don't look for the dog under D or P. Nope, you'll find it under E — for "the cutest dog on Earth…(Except for your dog)," with all the e's printed in red. And don't look for the letter O in its usual place because — "Oops! We left out O. Oh well. We all make mistakes." Expect giggles. http://apps.npr.org/best-books-2014/#/book/ahha-to-zigzag-31-objects-from-cooper-hewittsmithsonian-design-museum

The Brian Lehrer Show Which Type?

By Brian Lehrer WNYC Brian Lehrer Show December 10, 2014

Ellen Lupton, director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt and of one of their (re-) opening shows, "Beautiful Users," and author of Type on Screen: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Developers, and Students (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), talks about how the web and its various platforms affect type selection, plus she discusses the reopening of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/which-type/

Playing Designer, Inside a Carnegie Mansion

By Gisele Regatao WNYC News December 14, 2014

Installation view of the Immersion room at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. (Matt Flynn)

Outside, it’s a Carnegie mansion from the early 20th century. Inside, there are things like one digital wall paper room and four touch-screen digital tables.

After a three year, $91 million renovation, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is reopening its Carnegie mansion on 91st Street and Fifth Avenue.

The museum didn't add footprint, but converted office spaces to galleries. Now it has 60 percent more exhibition space and several interactive features that invite the public to design objects digitally and with real objects, in its Process Lab. A digital pen that will allow visitors to “collect” and “save” information in the museum will launch in early 2015.

Caroline Baumann, director of Cooper Hewitt, said one of the goals of the renovation was to try to make design relevant to different audiences, and to inspire them to think and create like designers. “We really wanted to break down the traditional museum experience of ‘don’t write on the walls, don’t write on the tables’ and instead say: have a great time in here.”

Damian Ortega's "Controller of the Universe," at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (Gisele Regatao)

Designer Lindsey Adelman created basic light fixtures for the Process Lab, which can be completed with several materials sitting around. "Design should feel really nonintimidating," said Adelman. “I want in a way to get rid of this mystery that sometimes surrounds industrial design.”

Ten inaugural exhibitions feature more than 700 objects throughout four floors of the mansion. Author and illustrator Maira Kalman is the guest curator for what used to be Carnegie's music room.

She said the room is loosely defined as being about life and death. She decorated it with objects from the museum’s collection that she loves, as well as her own objects, including a hand-made ladder that comes from a collection of about six of them that often go in her living room. “It’s a beautiful construction that speaks to me of optimism, and creativity,” she said.

Kalman opens the show with a small embroiling from the 5th to 7th centuries of a woman with a serious look. She places it on a blue column with a quote from Charles Darwin: “But I am very poorly today, and very stupid, and hate everybody and everything. One lives only to make blunders.” Kalman has that phrase in her living room as well. “It makes you remember that you are allowed to make mistakes, you can feel really awful and then go on with the business of working,” she said.

One of the other exhibits features objects by the two sisters who founded Cooper-Hewitt in 1897, Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, granddaughters of industrialist Peter Cooper.

Installation view of "Maira Kalman Selects" at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (Matt Flynn)

http://www.wnyc.org/story/playing-designer-inside-carnegie-mansion/

In The Papers 12/12/14

By Pat Kiernan NY1 December 12, 2014

NY1 VIDEO: NY1 takes a look at what’s in today’s New York City newspapers.

http://www.ny1.com/content/220304/in-the-papers-12-12-14/

Manhattan's Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Reopens NY1 December 12, 2014

After a three year renovation, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum is set to reopen today.

The museum is located inside the restored Carnegie Mansion on the Upper East Side.

It's the only museum in America dedicated exclusively to contemporary and historic design.

Museum officials say the renovation added 60 percent more exhibition space.

The official reopening is set for 11 a.m.

For more information, go online to www.CooperHewitt.org.

http://www.ny1.com/content/news/220309/manhattan-s-cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-designmuseum-reopens/

Manhattan’s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Set to Reopen After Major Renovation

By Stephanie Simon NY1 December 5, 2014

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum is getting ready to reopen after a three-year $81 million renovation. NY1’s Stephanie Simon filed the following report.

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum has been totally transformed, but that doesn't mean you can't add your own touch. Here you can change the designer wallpaper with the swipe of your finger.

“We just finished a mammoth three-year renovation which was a renovation and a renewal of the more than 100-year-old Carnegie Mansion. But it was also a rethinking of how we wanted to inspire and educate people about design and a lot of that we'll be doing through our interactive experiences and our astonishing interactive tools,” said Director Caroline Baumann.

The entire museum going experience here has been reimagined or even redesigned. Including the new Cooper Hewitt pen which u can use during your visit and it also you to take some of the museum home with you.

“Put your camera and iPhone and all those devices away because all you need to do is delicately tap the pen. Here it is. Delicately tap this end into the label and all of information about the object is downloaded to your account,” said Baumann.

So what is design? Well, just about everything.

“Everything human beings touch and make a decision about there is some aspect of design. So from everything from a computer chip to cities to the streetscapes to the parks we design to large systems, the Internet, transportation systems. That's all design,” said Cooper Hewitt’s curatorial director, Cara McCarty.

Another great redesign, the museum moved staff offices out of the building so that nearly all of museum could be used for exhibitions.

Outside, even the beloved garden has been rethought.

“Let's open those doors at 7:30 a.m. and welcome all New Yorkers to the Cooper Hewitt garden,” said Baumann.

It's a first. The garden will now open to the public at 7:30 a.m. and admission to the garden will now be free.

The museum reopens December 12.

http://www.ny1.com/content/219957/manhattan-s-cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum-setto-reopen-after-major-renovation/

Grand Opening of the Redesigned Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum WNBC Channel 4 December 18, 2014

Cara McCarty, curatorial director at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, sits down with Roseanne Colletti to discuss the grand opening of the museum after its redesign.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/video/#!/on-air/as-seen-on/Grand-Opening-of-the-RedesignedCooper-Hewitt--Smithsonian-Design-Museum/286304111

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/week-23

December 2014

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Reopens

By Elizabeth Stamp Architectural Digest December 10, 2014

The south façade of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Photo: Jennifer Northrop, © 2014 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

On Friday New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will reopen and reveal the results of a three-year, $91 million renovation of its home, the Carnegie Mansion. But the changes to the museum are far from just cosmetic. The transformation also includes new interactive technologies, from high-definition touch-screen tables that can be used to explore the collection to the Immersion Room, which lets visitors experience the wallpaper collection (America’s largest, by the way) at full scale.

“We are a museum of design, and we recruited a dream team of designers to develop the new Cooper Hewitt,” director Caroline Baumann said at a preview event on Tuesday. The roster includes 13 design

firms, which collaborated on every aspect of the museum, from system upgrades and exhibition displays to graphic identity and more. Gluckman Mayner Architects expanded the exhibition space sixfold (including a new 6,000-square-foot gallery on the third floor), improved circulation through the spaces, and designed unobtrusive mechanical, lighting, and electrical updates. Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners guided the restoration and helped integrate new technology without changing the character of the 1902 building. Diller Scofidio + Renfro developed new modular displays (fabricated by Goppion), a new entry canopy on 90th Street, illuminated piers on Fifth Avenue, and the design for Shop Cooper Hewitt.

The Immersion Room provides an interactive look at the wallpaper collection.

Photo: Matt Flynn, © 2014 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

The transformation extends all the way to the institution’s name, which is now Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (changed from Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum). Pentagram created a visual identity befitting an organization entering a new era and called on type designer Chester Jenkins of Village to make a custom, open-source typeface, which can be downloaded for free from cooperhewitt.org.

The museum’s curators are taking advantage of the extra room with ten exhibitions and installations. “We gave them a relatively flexible exhibition space [on the third floor], which allows the historic spaces on floors one and two to be present and protected,” said architect Richard Gluckman. “Over the years there

was sometimes a tortured relationship between the scale of the object or the display apparatus and how they intervened into the historic space. But now the building is more flexible, and large-scale installations can be done.”

Controller of the Universe by Damián Ortega, part of the exhibition “Tools: Extending Our Reach,” located in the new third-floor gallery space.

Photo: Matt Flynn, © 2014 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

And there’s still plenty to come. The revitalized garden by Hood Design will debut in 2015, and the pièce de résistance of the new interactive capabilities, the Pen, will be available in early 2015. The Pen is a stylus that will allow visitors to interact with exhibition signage and the touch-screen tables to learn more about individual objects, as well as collect and save their favorites and their own designs, which can be accessed from a unique Web address printed on their entrance ticket.

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/blogs/daily/2014/12/cooper-hewitt-opening

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/architecture/innovators/2014/caroline-baumann-ad-innovators2014-article

#emptyCooperHewitt

By Sue Williamson W December 11, 2014

After a three-year renovation, theCooper Hewitt museum is ready to open its doors. To celebrate, the museum invited some of Instagram’s most design-savvy contributors to preview and photograph the new exhibits. Like the previous #Empty events at LACMA, the Guggenheim, MoMA PS1, the Louvre, and Frieze Art Fair, each user captured a stunningly unique perspective. See our favorite shots here.

http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/2014/12/empty-cooper-hewitt-design-museuminstagram/photos/slide/1

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Inaugural Exhibitions

By Elizabeth Stamp Architectural Digest December 2014

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/ad/art/2014/cooper-hewitt-new-exhibitions-slideshow?title=1

Cooper Hewitt’s Reopening is Fêted with a New Book from Illustrator Maira Kalman

By Carrie Hojnicki Architectural Digest September 16, 2014

Ah-Ha to Zig-Zag: 31 Objects from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is out next month from Rizzoli.

Children of all ages can enjoy Cooper Hewitt’s latest literary offering: Ah-Ha to Zig-Zag ($18, Rizzoli), a delightful illustrated guide to the museum’s permanent collection conceived by artist and author Maira Kalman. The book’s release is set to coincide with the institution’s muchanticipated December reopening.

Traveling A to Z through centuries of great design, Kalman’s picture book is as educational as it is whimsical. The tour begins with the lyrical dictum "Perhaps put on your thinking cap," which the author pairs with a 14th-century Egyptian hat. The fun continues with a Royal Copenhagen rabbit figurine, a Porca Miseria! chandelier, and a Parisian dessert fork from the turn of the 20th century, among other special objects. Gerrit Rietveld’s Zig-Zag chair rounds out the alphabet, with a bit of wisdom from the author: "Life is not a straight line, life is a zig zag."

But perhaps most engaging for the younger design aficionados out there is Kalman’s final question: "If you were starting a museum, what would you put in your collection?"

Click to see Cooper Hewitt through the lens of Maira Kalman’s illustrations.

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/blogs/daily/2014/09/maira-kalman-book-cooper-hewitt-article

How the Home Telephone Sparked the User-Centered Design Revolution

By Margaret Rhodes Wired January 22, 2015

Have you ever thought about why doorknobs are positioned at around two-fifths of the door’s height, instead of right in the middle? Or why a washing machine is of its particular shape and size? These sound like stoner thoughts, but there’s actually an entire discipline and rich design history devoted to the answers.

In 1955 industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss publishedDesigning for People, a seminal book for the design industry. Way back when, Leonardo da Vinci theorized on man as the main unit of measurement for the world. In the 1920s, Bauhaus student Ernst Neufert published a book on human dimensions that helped set certain building standards. But no one since had promoted the idea as carefully as Dreyfuss. He

introduced the ideas of user-centered design and ergonomics by drawing diagrams of a typical man and woman and using them to map out human movement. (His model humans, “Joe” and “Josephine,” were based on heaps of data from the military and the fashion industry.) Products, Dreyfuss argued, should be crafted according to these measurements and movements.

In Ellen Lupton’s new book Beautiful Users: Designing for People, which accompanies an exhibit by the same name at the newly reopened Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, Lupton tells a story about the early days of usercentric design. In the 1930s, Dreyfuss designed a phone for Bell Labs, to be given to AT&T consumers (in those days, phones were like cable boxes: you just took the one they gave you). The Model 302 telephone was black with a rotary dial. It had a statuesque curved base and handsome receiver. It was a beautiful object. But when telephone-talkers tried to cradle it between shoulder and cheek, the phone would swivel away and fall. In 1953, Dreyfuss did things differently. His Model 500 is boxier— less of a stunner—but far more usable. Thanks to the receiver’s chunkier handle and flattened back, handsfree talking was much easier. The thinking behind the form was rare for industrial design of the time. And if you look at phones since—from portable landline phones to our smartphones today—they all mimic its squared-off shape.

The Measure of Man diagrams, by Henry Dreyfuss.

Matt Flynn

This approach to making stuff may sound utterly obvious. But consider Lupton’s argument: “The forces that drive product development range from the short-term economic interests of manufacturers to the expressive or theoretical intent of designers to a community’s entrenched habits and customs.” Put differently: money, ego, and habit often inform design instead of carefully considered human needs. The ones that do take usability into account often endure. Lupton’s book carries the idea forward into 2015.

Beautiful Users catalogs dozens of modern products made with careful consideration of interaction and interface, or as Lupton puts it, the “points of friction between people and devices.” The book documents the evolution of the wall thermostat, from a 1943 design for the Acratherm Gauge module to the Nest. Contemporary products like Harry’s razors, August smart lock, and Sabi’s line of aging-at-home wares are featured. There’s a ton of cutlery.

For a deeper look, you can pick up the book, Beautiful Users, or check out the exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/home-telephone-sparked-user-centered-design-revolution/#x

December 2014

http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/2014/12/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-designmuseum/?adbid=542412157434859523&adbpl=tw&adbpr=14791162&mbid=social_20141209_36998 697

December-January 2014-2015

15 Smart Design Books to Inspire You in 2015

By Margaret Rhodes Wired December 30, 2014

Sure, you probably read everything on your tablet now. Novels, magazines, the news— it’s all easily and conveniently accessed on the medium screen. But there’s still no touch screen replacement for the tactile experience of flipping through a gorgeous coffee table book—especially one that’s a smart survey on classic album cover design, or an explainer on the kitschy Tiki trend that swept through the United States in the 1960s, like a couple of the tomes included here.

With 2015 around the corner, it’s a good time to look back on the whip smart design books that came out in 2014. Here at WIRED we covered a handful of them, and admired a few from afar. Click through the slideshow above for eye candy, big picture inspiration, and a good dose of weird trivia.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/15-smart-design-books-inspire-2015/#slide-id-1687731

September 2014

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/reviews/coffee-table-books-0914

Our National Design Museum Releases a Free Font Designed by Masters

By Liz Stinson Wired February 4, 2015

When the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum reopened in December after three years of renovations, it greeted visitors with shiny new touchscreen tables, interactive electronic pens and 10 inaugural exhibitions. It also greeted them with a new name and totally overhauled graphic identity. If you didn’t notice the last two, no one will hold it against you.

For as long as the design museum’s been open (so since 1897), there’s been a conspicuous lack of design consistency in its branding. The name was one thing: Was it is the National Design Museum? The CooperHewitt? The Smithsonian National Design Museum? And what was that italicized typeface they were

using? “Cooper Hewitt didn’t have anything,” says Eddie Opara. “It was like a blank slate, a really blank slate.”

The museum tapped Opara and Michael Gericke, both partners at Pentagram New York, to build an identity from the ground up. Both the typeface and logo are being used all over the museum: exhibition labelings, the website, press materials and even on the building’s facade. In a fitting play to democratic design, the typeface is also available to download for free in different weights. It’s kind of like Google’s free fonts, only way better. “Thousands of people have already downloaded this thing,” says Opara. “That’s a good sign.”

To start, Opara worked on renaming the institution, changing it from Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum to the slightly more manageable Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (easier way to say it yet: “the Cooper Hewitt”). He also gave the museum’s visual system a much needed dose of cohesion, which had been built in piecemeal over the years.“It’s incredibly hard for a museum that is partially federally funded and under the guise of government to design anything with any modicum of design consistency,” Opara explains. “Because it doesn’t exist within the American government.”

The centerpiece of the design is a simple, stout word mark that stacks “Cooper” atop of “Hewitt” like two Lego blocks. Compared to the overtly artsy logos of museums like the Whitney and even the Serpentine

Gallery (designed by Pentagram’s MarinaWiller), Cooper Hewitt’s could almost be considered plain.

“Some people might think it borders on banality,” says Opara. “To that I would say, start using it, mate.”

Clearly, this is a logo made by designers for designers. It’s not art, at least not in comparison. It reeks of functionality and purpose, which is exactly what Opara wanted and what the Cooper Hewitt needed to allow the things inside the museum to shine. Pentagram worked with Chester Jenkins of Village to create a custom typeface called Cooper Hewitt. It’s a modification of Galaxie Polaris Condensed, a geometric, sans-serif font that Jenkins had worked on years ago. Looking at the wordmark you’ll notice Cooper and Hewitt are perfectly aligned, creating a rectangle that can be scaled up and down depending on the need.

This is the result of tailoring the spacing and weight of the font so it sits in a perfect typographic frame.

“The more you look at it the more you realize, it’s not supposed to do that,” says Opara. “If you’re a designer you’re like, ‘Wow, holy crap, the spacing is totally perfect.’” It’s a small detail, but it elevates the wordmark. You could argue that much of the best design in the world thrives on similarly invisible craftsmanship, the subtle but important details that were made to be taken for granted.

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/national-design-museum-releases-free-font-designedmasters/#slide-id-1702711

An Innovative Museum That Lets You Play the Role of a Designer

By Margaret Rhodes Wired December 11, 2014

The last time we saw the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, in June, its four floors of expansive galleries were immaculately polished, exceedingly lovely, and totally empty. They’re empty no longer.

On Friday, after three years of renovations, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum will reopen to the public. The rooms in the former Carnegie Mansion—

painstakingly restored by conservationists—house 10 inaugural exhibits that will take visitors through the history of the design industry—and let them glimpse into its future.

Along with the permanent collection, which includes everything from 18th century Chinese birdcages to Milton Glaser’s iconic, psychedelic Bob Dylan poster, the museum has created pit stops to give guests a closer look into how designers actually work. This is where the new Cooper Hewitt shines: It’s a museum meant for play.

Most of this is done through the dining room table-sized touchscreens, designed by Local Projects, that are scattered throughout the museum. To get visitors into the mindset of a designer, for example, one of these displays asks you to redesign an everyday object, like a turnstile, or a tent, or a shopping cart. When you pick one, the display prompts you with a design problem, like: How can you redesign a shopping cart to be more fun for kids? Visitors can scribble blueprints on top of the images on screen, and submit them to a bank of ideas. (When the museum’s electronic pens become available in February, they’ll be used for this as well as for digitally storing items from the collections.)

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

The Process Lab, located downstairs, hosts a handful of non-digital interactive stations, like a booth that lets you prototype different solutions for lamp designs. If you needed a lamp with softer light, for example, what materials would you choose? It’s a little like an arts-and-crafts table at a children’s museum, but with a clearer initiative: To lay bare the idea that designers don’t just make things beautiful, they strive to solve problems.

Upstairs visitors will find the Immersion Room, where they can access thousands of historical wallpaper designs through a touch screen table. The designs project at full scale onto two walls, and snippets of audio from the designers give guests background on the origin of the patterns. If they so choose, visitors can trace their own patterns and watch as it scales into a new wallpaper creation.

Just around the corner is the “Tools: Extending Our Reach” exhibit, which will be open until May 25, 2015, visitors can float between micro-exhibits like “Make,” where the Cooper Hewitt’s curators have installed a sketchbot that draws portraits of visitors in sand, as well as the inFORM display from MIT’s Media Lab that lets visitors manipulate physical objects through a digital interface. Just a few steps away from these high-tech projects you’ll find an installation of old tools hanging from the ceiling, as if dynamite went off in an Dust Bowl-era toolshed.

This tension between old and new is everywhere in the new Cooper Hewitt. Massive screens hang among the carefully restored trappings of the 19th century Carnegie Mansion. Blown up renderings of the The Measure of Man posters from 1969, designed

by Henry Dreyfuss, hang on the wall next to a person-sized digital display that asks you to strike a pose, which an algorithm matching your posture to an object from the permanent collection. Upstairs, near a satellite and a space suit, there’s a glass case with stone tools from 1.85 million years ago—and a first generation iPhone. It’s a considered choice: The Cooper Hewitt aims to be the nation’s definitive design museum, and it knows that the field is changing at breakneck pace.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/innovative-museum-lets-play-roledesigner/?mbid=social_twitter#slide-id-1675125

A Glimpse Into the Incredible High-Tech Future of Museums

By Kyle Vanhemert Wired November 10, 2014

This talk is from WIRED by Design, a two-day live magazine event that celebrated all forms of creative problem solving.

Museums are rushing to incorporate technology into their offerings. Designer Jake Barton has been responsible some of the most effective examples yet.

At WIRED by Design, Barton discussed how his group, Local Projects, approached their greatest challenge yet: co-designing the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City. The team sought to tell the story through the people who were actually involved in it; you can listen to testimonials from first responders and explore interactive tributes to people who died that day. To convey how 9/11 shaped the global conversation, Local Projects developed an algorithmic piece that visualizes over two million news articles from the months and years following the attack, tracking media coverage of topics like air travel and Al-Qaeda.

Barton also gave a sneak peek of some forthcoming work. For the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Local Projects conceived of a magic pen that lets visitors explore the museum’s collection through a series of brilliant interactive experiences. Drawing a shape on one of several touchscreen tables instantly searches the museum’s archive for an object whose form includes that shape. “It’s making this formal argument…that all of design starts with that,” Barton says.

“Whether it’s digital or physical, a pencil or a pen: line work. Humans are making things. And out of that comes the entire designed world we live within.”

For more, see live.wired.com.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/glimpse-incredible-high-tech-future-museums/

An Ingenious Museum Design That Turns Visitors Into Creators

By Margaret Rhodes Wired June 20, 2014

In theater, the “fourth wall” is the invisible barricade at the front of the stage, through which the audience observes the action while the players act as though the audience isn’t there.

If such a thing exists in museums—and it does, in the form of glass casing and “Please don’t touch” signs—the newly renovated Cooper Hewitt is taking a step towards getting rid of it. This December, after three years of renovation, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (formerly Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum) in New York will reopen with 60 percent more gallery space than before, and a range of new interactive

technologies by Local Projects that will let visitors engage with the museum’s collection in a totally novel way.

In the revamped Cooper Hewitt, still in Carnegie Mansion, there will be around 15 new interactive screen displays where users can draw, design, and virtually explore the Cooper Hewitt collection. Much of this will happen via an electronic pen conceived by Local Projects and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and designed by Cooper Hewitt, GE, Sistelnetworks and Undercurrent. Each is paired with a unique URL on the visitor’s ticket, and as guests pass through different galleries they can touch the tip of their pen to wall text next to objects they find interesting, or inspiring.1The pen then stores those selections.

Letting Visitors Remake the Archives The museum still is finalizing details, but either way what follows will be a free-flowing, open-ended experience: with their pen, visitors can download all their selected items into a screen, and begin designing. They could, for example, decorate a room, or modify a classic piece of furniture. Local Projects founder Jake Barton also created an algorithm for drawing on the screens. Draw any shape, and the computer will retrieve similar items from the collection. For instance: If you draw a classic vase shape, you’ll suddenly have a register of all the Cooper Hewitt’s vases at your fingertips.

Barton will also be a speaker at WIRED by Design.

Stanley Chow for WIRED

“We don’t want to be overly prescriptive,” Barton says. “We are playing with the capacity for visitors to design what they make, and give them scaffolding them to know what to design and how to do it better.” The system’s flexibility means the experience could be just as satisfying for a five-year-old—who draws a shape only to learn what he drew was a tea cup—as it is for a 60-year-old interior decorator, who can trace the silhouette of a classic bute shape tea cup from memory, but can’t quite place the era of ceramics from which it came.

In the Immersion Room—which Barton calls “the marquee example” for the interactive displays—visitors can tap into the museum’s vast collection of wall coverings and wallpapers, and project their designs onto an entire room of blank walls.

Giving visitors agency over their own experience is Barton’s specialty. At the recently opened National September 11 Memorial Museum, part of the digital display from Barton and his team is a section where visitors can offer up their own messages, and see them projected, 30 seconds later, across the wall inside, that holds back the Hudson River.

There, especially, is where Barton sees visitors taking their photo.

“You can poke fun, or draw concern with people taking pictures of themselves, or selfies, but it’s this incredible way for them to remember their own part of it and share what they remember,” Barton says. “A lot of our insights are based on the ways in which people spend time at museums. They’re curious, open, interested, and engaging. They want to express themselves and see their own identity refracted through the museum’s.”

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/a-design-museum-that-turns-its-visitors-into-designers/

The 5 Coolest Things about the Revamped Smithsonian Design Museum

By Shaunacy Ferro Fast Company December 9, 2014

DOODLE ON THE WALLS! DRAW YOUR OWN VASE! AFTER A THREE-YEAR RENOVATION, THE COOPER HEWITT REOPENS WITH SOME FANCY NEW TECH

After closing its doors three years ago for a massive renovation, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is finally reopening the century-old mansion that houses

the design museum. In its new incarnation, the Cooper Hewitt taps into what distinguishes a design museum, which celebrates functional objects built with users in mind, from any other museum full of beautiful objects: It allows you to play with the collection, rather than just look at it.

On December 12, the Smithsonian Design Museum opens once again within the newly renovated and revamped Carnegie Mansion, home to steel baron Andrew Carnegie and his family until after his wife's death in 1949. Expect a slicker, more 21st-century museum—it dropped the stodgy hyphen from its former name, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, debuted a new open-source typeface and a Pentagramdesigned graphic identity, and expanded its gallery space by 60%. The museum has also used its hiatus to rethink how visitors interact with the collection (which includes hundreds of thousands of examples of wallpaper, products, graphic design and more dating back to 1500 B.C.) in the process attempting to design one of the most cuttingedge experiences for a museum today.

IT'S A GIANT CURIOSITY MACHINE.

Cooper Hewitt has been working with designers like Local Projects' Jake Barton(known for his work with the 9/11 museum and memorial) and High Line andMoMA architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro to create a space that's as relevant and engaging to a worldrenown professional designer as it is to a group of schoolchildren.

"I think it’s a unique opportunity for a design museum that differentiates us from an art museum," Sebastian Chan, director of digital and emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt, says of the new, technology-focused experiences the museum is introducing, like an interactive digital pen that lets you explore the collection through drawing. "Design’s about doing; art’s about looking. That’s important in this city [full of art museums], to actually state a claim about what a design museum is and can be." Here are a few of the coolest new features:

A DIGITAL PEN FOR VISITORS

"Museums, I think, are becoming more and more aware of how to turn themselves into a must-see spectacle," Barton says. Especially with much of the museum collection already online, the Cooper Hewitt—and every museum that makes money off admissions—needs to get people through the door.

For the new Cooper Hewitt, the spectacle starts with a new device: a pen. Starting in early 2015, every visitor to the museum will receive an interactive digital pen with their ticket. When you touch the pen to labels on the exhibition display cases and elsewhere in the museum, a digital copy of those items is saved to an online account accessible via a URL on the back of each ticket. You can save objects on display you want to look up later to explore more in-depth, or share what you saw with your friends via email.

The initial idea for the device came out of a brainstorming session with the design team where the conversation turned toward how to make the museum a more social experience. "This happens in many conversations, where people just say 'You know what we really need in this? We need a bar, because people should just be drinking and having fun and enjoying themselves,'" Barton explains. "And I was like, 'You know, you need a bar, and you need a pen.' You want to be drawing and sketching and discovering. You want it to be this social sort of generous experience."

Only a fraction of the entire museum's collection can be displayed at any given time, and the pen is a way to bridge the divide between the physical collection on display in

the museum and the digital collection that exists online. As of the reopening, only 726 objects are on display in the museum, but the online collection spans more than 188,000 objects. Interactive digital tables within the galleries recommend related works not on display, and bookmarking objects with the pen gives visitors a reason to visit the online collection after they leave. As a piece of experience design, the pen was created to be a "quiet" device—one that wouldn't attract too much attention. It's not another screen, or an app on your phone. And because everyone knows how to use a pen, it's not hard to figure out what to do with it. "It’s not there to flash up alerts and be in your face. It’s there to be there when you need it, and to give you permission to draw," Chan says. "This is like saying to people, when you come in the door, you’ve got permission to do anything you want. It’s kind of cool, right? It’s symbolic in that way. Being a pen, it works like a pen, so you don’t need instructions."

INTERACTIVE TABLES

The pen works with the museum's new high-resolution touch-screen tables, where visitors can look at the items they've saved on their pens, draw their own designs, and generally explore the collection in a different way (using software designed by Local Projects). The seven tables scattered throughout the museum are kind of like giant tablets (a few are seven feet long and can be used by up to six people at a time), with a river of digital icons flowing consistently down the middle. These icons represent items in the collection—vases, wallpaper swatches, drawings—and they can be grabbed at random just by dragging them off onto the side of the table. More information on the

item, as well as a series of related items, comes up, allowing you to delve deeper into a piece of design. "It's a giant curiosity machine," Barton says.

The best part of the interactive tables is that you can browse the collection simply by doodling a shape. Playing with a prototype of the table in Barton's office, I draw a halfhearted squiggle, and a vase that incorporates a similar shape pops up. I draw a circle, and a tapestry appears. I doodle a few curvy lines, and Peter Schlumbohm's Chemex pour-over coffee maker appears.

"At its simplest, that allows you a fun, engaging way into the collection," Barton says.

"But it does have this sort of conceptual point, which is that every piece of design started with a human hand. Whether it’s a computer or a pen drawing, design is about drawing shapes and making physical things."

EVERY PIECE OF DESIGN STARTED WITH A HUMAN HAND.

Because the collection is meant to serve as inspiration for contemporary designers, there's also a function to draw your own digital designs, and save them to your online museum account with your pen. Draw a few lines, and the software will turn it into a 3D rendering of a table, or a lamp, or a chair, or a building, or a hat. You can add different colors and shapes, manipulating your design, adding textures like metal or ceramic attributes, seeing how your simple line drawing could be the basis for a lamp or a skyscraper.

THE WALLPAPER ROOM

Perhaps the most unique feature of the new Cooper Hewitt in the Immersion Room, a space where you can use the same type of interactive table that's featured throughout the rest of the museum to explore the Cooper Hewitt's historic wallpaper collection. The Cooper Hewitt houses the largest collection of wallpaper in the United States— thousands of pieces—but much of the samples take the form of small swatches, only a few feet long at most. The Immersion Room allows visitors to browse the wallpaper collection digitally, and project it onto the walls of the room, recreating the immersive physical experience intended by the wallpaper's designer. Selecting certain pieces on the touch-screen table brings up audio narration by designers like architect Clive Wilkinson and Roberston Hartnett of wallpaper studio twenty2.

THE COOPER HEWITT HAS THE LARGEST COLLECTION OF WALLPAPER IN THE UNITED STATES.

Similar to the other interactive tables, the Immersion Room's table lets you draw your own designs. You can create your own wallpaper patterns to project on the wall and learn about how wallpaper is designed. (Yes, you can save your personal pattern to your pen.) Though only one wallpaper can be projected at a time, two different people can use the software at once, allowing people to use one side of the table for examining historic samples while drawing their own wallpaper on the other side, or to play off what the museum visitor alongside them is drawing.

GESTURE MATCH

One of the Cooper Hewitt's opening exhibitions, "Beautiful Users," explores the history and evolution of user-centered design. For the exhibition, Local Projects designed Gesture Match, an interactive experience that help visitors understand the relationship between the human body and design. "We wanted to basically identify the shape of people’s bodies along with the designs that they inspired," Barton explains, "meaning physical form factors and how those things actually contributed to the design of actual objects."

You stand in front of a large digital screen that cycles through life-sized silhouettes of human bodies in different positions. Strike a pose in front of the motion sensors, and Gesture Match will cycle through its catalog of gestures to connect your posture to a piece of design. Raise up both arms, and a magazine cover from the collection featuring a doll in a similar position will appear. Pretend to drink something, and it will bring up a set of cups. Raise one hand up to the ceiling, and a lightbulb—the kind you might twist out of a fixture above your head—shows up. A dancing position reveals a historic drawing of a mansion room—"this bathroom is big enough for a dance party," the description reads.

THE PROCESS LAB

The Process Lab is a section of the museum that focuses on hands-on design experiences. Visitors are invited to design their own lamps with LED bulbs and a

selection of pre-cut materials, and to handle and evaluate different versions of the same product (like water bottles) to explore why so many iterations of the same object exist.

In this room, the interactive tables aren't focused on the well-designed objects in the museum's collection, but the designs we encounter every day that could be improved.

"Design It Better" is a basic introduction to design thinking and the design process. It invites visitors to sketch new features for ubiquitous objects, like a backpack, a prescription pill bottle, or a newspaper, or a drinking fountain. The app asks you to consider the end user of a particular object—could a backpack be redesigned for a really organized student? Could the water fountain be redesigned to work better for someone in a wheelchair? How could a newspaper be easier to read on the train? You can explore previous visitors' ideas and vote for your favorites.

LEARNING ABOUT DESIGN BY BEING A DESIGNER

All these new technological features are designed to make the Cooper Hewitt a place where you not only learn about design, but undergo a design training of sorts. The pen, the interactive tables, and the Immersion Room are all about engaging with the collection as design inspiration, an idea that harks back to the Hewitt sisters' original intent for the library of designs they collected for what was originally dubbed the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration.

"These weren’t originally collected to be precious objects in the way that you think about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or MoMA," Barton explains. "The Hewitt sisters were these amazing both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-

handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design." The original collection was housed in cases where young designers could come pull out swatches of wallpaper, study them, copy them, and learn from them—it was a practical learning space for the visual arts. In the 21st century, that historic wallpaper has become a bit more precious, but new technology allows a contemporary return to that practice. You can pull up something from the wallcoverings collection and copy it, zoom in on it, examine it in detail. You can trace the shapes of historic objects to get a better sense of how designs changed over the years. In this way, the Cooper Hewitt has created a museum that can be experienced anew every time you visit, whether the exhibits have changed or not, creating experiences that are worth returning for.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3039370/the-5-coolest-things-about-the-revamped-smithsoniandesign-museum

December 29, 2014 – January 11, 2015

http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/cooper-hewitt-reopening-objects.html

Architecture Review: The Buzzy New Cooper Hewitt

By Justin Davidson New York December 9, 2014

Historic renovations often require cranes and concrete; refurbishing the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum also demanded more sophisticated tools, like Q-tips and distilled water. When the national design museum, a branch of the Smithsonian lodged in the former Carnegie Mansion, reopens on December 12, after $81 million and three fallow years, returning loyalists may have a hard time picking out all the differences. You can’t miss the aerodynamic new front desk, designed

by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which looks like it might have been salvaged from the Starship Enterprise. But you’d have to be pretty vigilant to find the wound where workers sliced through an ornate carved-wood wall, backed it with a 2,000-pound steel plate, and mounted it on hinges to create an opening to a hidden freight elevator.

That secret panel is the stuff of stately homes, and the overhaul has preserved the mansion’s aura of antique privilege. Workers spiffed up the interior without rendering it gaudy, reproduced the original octagonal parquet pattern in vintage teak, and brought out the elaborate drama of filigreed ceilings.

Aside from the obligatory sprinklers and necessary but regrettable track lighting, much of the house looks the same, only livelier. The Lockwood de Forest room, so fantastically, exotically ornate that it could have been whittled by an army of elves, has the oddly vivid look of a dream. Restorers swabbed at it millimeter by millimeter, lifting away a brown crud of cigar smoke, grease, and petrified dandruff. What emerged was a deep mahogany sheen full of shadows and highlights and a pale canvas wall-covering, ornamented with daubs of gold.

The credits on the new Cooper Hewitt (which has dropped its hyphen) resemble the roll call at the end of a major motion picture, and separating out the contributions of, say, Gluckman Mayner Architects from those of Beyer Blinder Belle would require consulting a spreadsheet. Dividing the labor prevented any single design sensibility from taking over, which means that the spirit of Babb, Cook & Willard’s original design still predominates. Even so, the galleries grew by 60 percent, largely by taking over the 6,000-square-foot third-floor room that the Carnegie family used as nursery and gym. From a curator’s point of view, that space was blessedly dilapidated: no graceful moldings or elaborate plaster ceilings, just an attic to be spiffed up into a neutral loft. A room with personality gets in the way of the exhibits.

But if the renovation preserved the Cooper Hewitt’s physical integrity, the relaunch has provoked some soulful reinvention. A design museum is also necessarily a technology showcase. The opening exhibits include a space suit, a flying robotic bumblebee, Michael Eden’s 3-D-printed vase made out of chlorophyll-colored nylon, and a scale model of a giant tunnel-boring machine. Until now, hightech artifacts always seemed slightly out of place in the hand-tooled Beaux-Arts interiors, whose stunning effects were achieved by wrecking countless fingers, eyes, and lungs. Now the museum has transposed this analog detail into the digital world by commissioning a 3-D digital scan of the entire mansion, making the data available free and inviting the public to manipulate it at will. Care to shoot a CGI movie in Andrew Carnegie’s bedroom or releaseAssassin’s Creed: The Robber Baron Edition, or produce a buildable miniature mansion? Knock yourself out.

To update the physical experience, the Cooper Hewitt hired the interactive design firm Local Projects, which imported the touch-screen aesthetic into a don’t-touch museum. In the Immersion Room, visitors can tap on a digital swatch from the wallpaper collection and see it instantly projected on two adjoining walls, which would be a useful feature in a home-decorating superstore. In the next few months, the museum will start equipping each visitor with an electronic pen. Point the breadstick-size gizmo at a wall label, and the object gets added to a personalized online album — essentially, a shopping cart of items you can’t buy.

The old Cooper Hewitt treated design as a repertoire of collectible objects. The new one finds that merely looking at things is a hopelessly passive way of experiencing the world. The touch-screen tables offer visitors a closer virtual look at the museum’s hidden treasures, which means that you can stand in front of a display case and see all that isn’t in it. The wired Cooper Hewitt is awash in narratives, so visitors can follow the curator’s thinking in the handsome new display cases, or they

can bounce around a free-associative flow chart, hopping among objects that are subliminally connected by being mauve, or patterned, or sinuous. The screens expand the physical space, allow viewers to make connections between disparate objects — and at the same time undermine the story that the curators have chosen to tell. Surrounding a show with other alternatives is like serving a home-cooked meal and laying a takeout menu at each place setting, or bringing an entourage on your honeymoon. It keeps options open, softens the finality of every decision, and puts the onus on the viewer — or the interactor — to navigate the sea of marginalia.

I rebel at all this programmed interaction, this dust storm of distractions. A traditional museum show is like a story, a speech, or a proposition. Once you’ve experienced it as the author intended, you can like it or not, accept its argument or not — maybe even rewrite and rearrange it in your mind. This does not make it a passive experience. To me, these internal responses to a fixed narrative represent a higher form of interactivity than the ability to swipe, drag, click, and move on. Freedom is a marvelous goal, but at least in a museum setting, I would like the option not to have options.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/architecture-review-the-buzzy-new-cooper-hewitt.html

Why It’s So Hard to Keep Beaux-Arts Museums Looking Beautiful

By Justin Davidson New York July 13, 2014

The Frick mansion under construction, 1913. Photo: Wurts Bros./Museum of the City of New York

It’s time again to thank Messrs. Carnegie, Frick, Warburg, Vanderbilt, Morgan & Co. The plutocrats of the last Gilded Age left us unfathomable architectural treasures that we cherish and fight over but are still not sure how to care for. They erected houses, museums, and libraries in the form of temples and Renaissance palazzos, great hunks of ornate stone, carved wood, and intricate parquet, anthologies of precious materials and medieval craft.

Some have been lost; touch what’s left and we get angry, alter them and we despair. As Manhattan keeps remaking itself, one shuttered shoe-repair store

and vanished brownstone at a time, these ornate piles endure—the Frick, the Cooper Hewitt, the Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, each with its tribe of passionate loyalists.

None of them is pristine. From the beginning, they experienced decades of fitful renovation, and their occupants still keep bursting through walls. There’s never enough space. Some institutions wear their history more lightly, or have the luxury of starting fresh. The Whitney will soon move into a brand-new building, and MoMA keeps knocking down anything that sits in its expansionist path. But most museums have to keep adapting to their old homes. They build additions and gut interiors to accommodate everexpanding crowds and collections, and every time a fluted column or pedimented doorway gets in the way of a future gallery, the same problem crops up: how to make a grand old building more rational and efficient without neutralizing its idiosyncrasies—how, in other words, to make it better without ruining it completely.

The one certainty of adding to a beloved Beaux-Arts monument is that most people are going to hate it. In 2001, when Davis Brody Bond slapped an ungainly glass-fronted appendage on the side of McKim, Mead & White’s Harvard Club on West 44th Street, the club’s members mutinied in court.

They lost the legal fight, but they were morally justified; the new structure has aged as badly as your high-school haircut. In 2006, Renzo Piano applied a similar technique with more finesse, and more justification, at the Morgan Library & Museum, though that renovation, too, still has some people foaming in fury.

Piano tied together an eclectic collection of historic buildings (a Victorian brownstone, J. P. Morgan’s baronial library by McKim, Mead & White, and a 1928 annex) with modernist connective tissue, all pure lines and clear glass.

Blunt contrast like that is the default strategy for expanding Beaux-Arts buildings, but it’s not the only option. At the other extreme, in 1993 Kevin

Roche doubled the size of the Jewish Museum with a tour de force of camouflage. Borrowing stonemasons from the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and limestone from the same quarry that furnished the original mansion, Roche copied out the frippery with the devotion of a Torah scribe.

The Frick wants to take that approach, too. Having defiled the Harvard Club, the architects at Davis Brody Bond now hope to add subtly and seamlessly to the existing Frick, making it look like a magnified mansion—the same as before, only bigger. That sleight of hand collides with a first principle of preservation: that the lines between historical periods should be clear. What the Frick urgently needs is a third way, somewhere between slavish reproduction and slavish opposition. There should be a modern equivalent for the craftsmanship, detail, and luxury materials of a century ago. The problem is, there isn’t.

To understand why we’re left with those two extreme but equally lackluster options—and why it’s so difficult to come up with a third—it helps to rewind to the late-19th century, when American architects gravitated to Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, a palatial complex on Rue Bonaparte that served as the incubator of official French aesthetics. The Beaux-Arts tradition was old-fashioned even then, a backward-looking discipline that both called to and irritated impatient American architects like Louis Sullivan. It treasured classical elements, refracted through the French and Italian Renaissance. Essentially, the school taught its students to produce refined knockoffs of knockoffs.

But the school was not just about a repertoire of ornaments and proportions; it offered a way of shaping society through architecture. Graduates aspired to design civic monuments, libraries, universities, government buildings, and temples of culture—the locomotives of modern life. Medieval Paris had grown in a tangle around Nôtre-Dame; the modern city converged more rationally on its own cathedral, the opera house. Today, though opera as an art form is no longer a social unifier and Paris’s old house has been upstaged by a newer one at Place de la Bastille, the immense, ornately costumed Palais Garnier stands

in the urban spotlight, a grande dame who refuses to recognize that her time has passed.

In New York, it was the industrial aristocracy that commandeered Beaux-Arts ambitions, building theatrical palaces that doubled as seats of power. The Vanderbilt family erected a row of mansions hip-to-flank along Fifth Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets. When the patriarch, William H. Vanderbilt, completed his in 1883, he flung open the doors and an audience of 2,500 came to gawp at its gaudy marbles and carved ceilings, an opulent setting for a heroic capitalist life. Virtually at the same time, Richard Morris Hunt (architect of the Metropolitan Museum and also the first American to attend the Paris mother school) was building Vanderbilt’s son William K. a French Renaissance mansion next door. This composite château for the ages lasted less than 50 years.

The Beaux-Arts aesthetic was by definition expensive. If you’re going to advertise a client’s fortune or a city’s greatness by merging modern technology with ancient motifs and stained-glass ceilings, carried out by scores of carvers, mosaicists, gilders, and bronze-casters, you’re not going to do it on the cheap.

Even cozy rooms were meant to impress with their lusciousness and perfection. Walls were not just paneled; they were sheathed in mahogany carved in India. People surely went blind fashioning those curlicues.

As the Gilded Age ebbed, that fussy splendor seemed increasingly out of joint in a democratic, optimistic society. Every move toward modernism was a step away from historicism. Severe skyscrapers, industrial-age proportions, a craving for simplicity, and the fetishistic appeal of glass, concrete, and exposed steel turned stone angels and Ionic capitals into faintly ridiculous affectations of the past. Generations of architects were trained to reject the Beaux-Arts, and we lost the knack for its ordinary extravagances. New York’s own Gilded Age opera house, with its flamboyantly grand interior, was torn down in 1967 and replaced by the austere one at Lincoln Center. Terra-cotta, originally an

affordable and more malleable alternative to hand-carved stone, more or less went out of production around the same time, and a lot of glazed tile façades were left to streak and crumble.

The Frick expansion plan by Davis Brody Bond. Photo: null/Courtesy of Neoscape Inc.

In the midst of Gilded Age II, architects are cautiously trying to resurrect early-20th-century textures here and there, with fitful success. Robert A.M. Stern lavished limestone on his throwback condo building at 15 Central Park West. Terra-cotta is getting a new life as a deluxe trim, used sparingly in ultrahigh-priced apartment buildings to set off acres of glass. And in the new Sugar Hill affordable-housing complex in Harlem, David Adjaye tried to emulate that olden handmade texture by etching a digital pattern of roses into the façade’s concrete, an abstract, ghosted version of the hand-tooled thistles and ornamental vines that adorn the genteel neighborhood’s brownstones and cornices. Adjaye managed to produce only a crude upholstery pattern rather than a fantastical evocation of Eden, but it’s hard to blame him. Laborious stonework, fanciful wrought iron, and all the other practices that once cast

shadows and conjured flickering drama on a building’s surface are now practically extinct, not just because of high costs and low skill but because our culture doesn’t value them. You can exhume these extravagances every once in a while for restoration projects (or for Roche’s Jewish Museum one-off), but otherwise the city is going shiny, simple, and smooth. That’s one reason we get so many glass-box additions. The best consolation for ignorance is to turn it into a rule.

By now, most Beaux-Arts buildings are architectural Frankenstein’s monsters, having grown new limbs and internal organs and had various portions sawed off over the decades. All that tinkering has left an uneven legacy of splendor and scars. The New York Public Library restored the spectacular reading room in its Fifth Avenue headquarters in 1998 (Davis Brody Bond again!) but recently had to close it again after a rosette detached from the ceiling in the middle of the night and plummeted (harmlessly) to the floor. But that’s the least of the building’s problems. Wander around the back-office space and, while the high marble hallways and battered wainscoting retain a certain disheveled dignity, other rooms have degenerated into a purgatory of fluorescent tubes, dropped ceilings, and rotting linoleum. The library has scrapped its plan to scoop out the stacks and implant a new circulating library, but it’s still developing a strategy to turn underused and off-limits acreage into public space—a huge and potentially transformative job, but oh, so easy to screw up.

Different institutions grow in different ways. The Frick keeps collecting clocks, small bronzes, and porcelain. The Met adds to its stock of modern and contemporary art, for which it needs more rational gallery space. The Cooper Hewitt is embracing the connective power of technology; it will reopen in December after an extensive overhaul by Gluckman Mayner Architects (and others) that has bared the beauty of its most voluptuous room, transformed the more utilitarian top floor from nursery-gym-storage to a big, flexible gallery, and rewired the whole space for the latest in interactive doodads. On a

recent preview tour, you could sense the curators’ lust for plain walls, track lighting, fresh parquet, and ample elevators. A curator can offer no greater architectural praise than to describe a room as “neutral.” The crucial feature of the renovation, though, is not a building but a product, an electronic pen that will be issued to all visitors so that they can redraw the world to their liking, like Harold with his purple crayon. They can use it to scan labels, save images of the items they choose to a personalized database, scrawl notes and sketches on touchscreen tables, and create their own wallpaper that gets multiplied and projected onto two full walls. In the demo, all this threatens to come dangerously close to gimmickry, but perhaps it will be revelatory in real life.

The Frick faces an even more extreme challenge, slipping a new six-story wing into its existing space without making the museum feel any bigger. Visiting Henry Clay Frick’s old mansion is like being invited to join the family for an intimate affair. You drift through his rooms, which are still filled with his furniture, and introduce yourself to another guest, Holbein’s Sir Thomas More, say, who stares past you, looking a bit thuggish with his five o’clock shadow, fierce eyes, and daggerlike nose pointing to some unseen interlocutor.

The Frick’s galleries are the opposite of contemporary neutral; they enfold the art in a domestic atmosphere, making each object seem like a possession that its owners have deeply loved. That intimacy is fragile. It shattered last winter, when an exhibition of masterpieces from the Mauritshuis (including Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and the suddenly famous The Goldfinch) drew intolerable crowds, turning art viewing into a contact sport.

Enlarging the museum could harm it, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried. A new annex would not turn the Frick into MoMA; rather, it would let the museum draw back the velvet rope that has always kept visitors from climbing the theatrical staircase to the unseen, splendid second-floor rooms, now used as offices. Besides, the Frick is already a mishmash of tasteful imitations. In the 1930s, John Russell Pope, an impeccably pedigreed BeauxArts classicist, expanded the original Carrère and Hastings mansion, adding

the gracious oval gallery and Art Reference Library, covering the central courtyard, smoothing the seams, and hewing to the masters’ habits of ornament and proportion. Forty years later, a trio of architects—named, with Gilded Age grandeur, John Barrington Bayley, Harry van Dyke, and G. Frederick Poehler—contributed the long, egg-yolk-yellow ticket hall to the right of the main entrance, a nice bit of fakery that few visitors can ever have questioned. Through the French doors is a delightful slice of a garden wrapped around a rectangular lily pond, designed by the distinguished landscape architect Russell Page in 1977. The new scheme would destroy it.

The Frick has a right to grow as it ages, and a record of graceful surgery. But it would be a mistake to expand into another bogus Beaux-Arts creation, a knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has jurisdiction here, and it should demand a more creative proposal. For precedents, there’s Annabelle Selldorf’s 2001 renovation of the Neue Galerie, an exquisitely sensitive mixture of faithfulness and freshness.

Selldorf didn’t have to build a new wing, but she cut, set, and buffed the interior spaces with a jeweler’s delicacy. She paired a ravishingly spare elevator with an ebullient curving stair and faced it in white glass. She recessed track lighting in high-ceilinged antique rooms, covered the floors of new galleries in somber oak planks, and turned the paneled dining room into an evocative Viennese café. The renovation twines together vastly different periods, not in an eclectic jangle but in delicate counterpoint. It’s an example that suggests a compromise between retread and plain glass box: a sumptuous blend of freshness and respect that by now should have set the standard, not remain the admired exception.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/why-its-hard-to-keep-museums-looking-beautiful.html

Inside a NYC museum’s radical $81 million reboot

By Pat Wechsler Fortune December 16, 2014

Cooper Hewitt Museum's new "Immersion Room" Photograph by Matt Flynn — Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum The Cooper Hewitt Museum’s radical reimagining took three years, careful cultivation of corporate donors and a big bet on digital.

Caroline Baumann, the director of New York City’s newly-refurbished and reimagined Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, says she never wants to hear, “Cooper what?” again. And after overseeing an $81 million transformation into a cutting-edge digital showcase that melds three centuries worth of technology and art, she may not have to.

The Cooper Hewitt, perhaps best known in decades past for the Victorian era opulence of the 113-year-old Andrew Carnegie mansion it calls home, is now basking in the global fascination with the marriages of form and function that catapulted companies like Apple [fortune-stock symbol=”AAPL”]to success. Long lines for museum exhibitions and education programs several years ago made a 60 percent expansion of the gallery space a necessity, Cooper Hewitt officials said.

The three-year renovation that followed ended up doing more than that: Cooper Hewitt has been widely praised by critics for pioneering participatory visitor experiences and immersion in a museum that integrates state-of-the-art robotics and 3D printing along side the innovative visions of earlier centuries.

“There’s a hunger for design,” explains Baumann, who has held various positions at the museum since 2001 and was at the Museum of Modern Art before that. “So our challenge was to rethink the museum experience to make it more relevant to design.

There’s so much competition, nationally and globally. How do we become America’s design museum and hold that flag high in the air?”

The journey to that chilly December 12 morning when Baumann and Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough cut the ribbon with a 3D-printed pair of scissors, courtesy of corporate sponsor 3D Systems, involved years of careful recruitment for the museum’s board of trustees of supporting companies and foundations that shared Cooper Hewitt’s design mission.

“I thought seriously about the need for companies to see their mission reaffirmed by their philanthropic activities as I recruited for the board,” Baumann explains. “That’s why I approached people like Avi Reichental, the CEO of 3D Systems [fortunestocksymbol=”DDD”], and Jon Iwata from IBM [fortune-stock symbol=”IBM”], and David Lubars of BBDO. These are all recent board members from companies heavily vested in design.

“Companies are not just plunking down money; they want to know why and how it fits with what they do,” Baumann explains. “There needs to be real logic between the gift and the purpose.”

Take, for instance, the critical role played by Bloomberg Philanthropies in helping to finance the digital aspects of the renovation.

“When I first went to them, the conversations weren’t about money,” Baumann recalls.

“They would say to me, ‘Caroline, this is the future of museums, so of course we’re interested. The money came later, but they have been partners from the start.”

“Today, companies are looking for more than the ‘This was brought to you by’ option with their philanthropy,” says Beth Comstock, GE’s chief marketing officer and the president of the Cooper Hewitt board of trustees since 2011. “Increasingly, brands are looking for opportunities to be part of an experience that reinforces who they are as a

company. For GE [fortune-stock symbol=”GE”], it was not just a good thing for our industrial design team to work on the renovation; it made strategic sense.”

For the GE design team, that meant working with the museum and several technology partners to fashion a critical element of the new Cooper Hewitt: The Pen, a portable digital companion for the visitor, offers the ability to not only collect information about objects seen on tour but also to save it and bring it home. Based on SistelNetworks’ vWand and near field communication (NFC) technology, The Pen amasses data on an object or design simply by touching any museum label with a NFC tag.

“This will replace the bulky audio tour,” Baumann says. “It revolutionizes the experience by letting them collect images and information from a day at the museum to review later, to even create over time their own collection if they choose. It encourages them to put away their cell phones and focus on what is in front of them.”

The Pen, which won’t be available until early 2015, also promotes participation in the activity of design and the problem-solving approach to design challenges. With it, visitors can draw on interactive tables in the museum, such as the one in the Process Lab, which includes a Design-It-Better application that invites museum visitors to improve the form and function of common products.

“This is the part of the new technology that I see as radical,” says Rosanna Flouty, an adjunct professor in museum studies at New York University. “They’re asking them to be creative or problem-solving. It’s experimental and exciting.”

For more than a decade, museums have focused on how to incorporate digital into their experience—either via a website or during the actual visit, according to Flouty and other museum experts interviewed. But the task, particularly of digitizing the actual museum trip, has been a challenge for smaller museums without the funding and staff to maintain the technology.

“People expect to be able to engage with their mobile devices, but when apps were first appearing five years ago only the biggest museums were able to consider them,” says Elizabeth Merritt, the founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, an initiative of the American Alliance of Museums. “Five years later, the economics of technology has made that affordable for smaller institutions.

“I imagine the same might be true one day for the cutting-edge technology that Cooper Hewitt is creating now,” Merritt says. “The problem with digital for museums is the fact that it’s constantly changing and very hard to anticipate and budget for.”

Besides The Pen, the new Cooper Hewitt offers such activities as the Immersion Room in which visitors are able to project more than 200 examples of the museum’s collection of wall coverings onto gallery walls or design a new one themselves. Cooper Hewitt also has created a new entrance through the mansion gardens where a café will open at 7:30 every morning.

“My goal is to make the museum a hub for designers, a real hangout, even though we’re on the Upper East Side and some people will say, ‘I won’t go north of 14thStreet,” Baumann says. “The key is to make sure so much is happening here they have to come.”

http://fortune.com/2014/12/16/cooper-hewitt-renovation-technology/

NYC’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum Reopens

By Molly Elizalde CondĂŠ Nast Traveler December 12, 2014

CC-BY License. Photo by Matt Flynn. Image courtesy Smithsonian Institution Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, South facade

After a three-year renovation, New York City's Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has reopened with interactive exhibits, revamped collections, and a renewed sense of purpose.

The first thing you notice about the new Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which reopened today after a three-year renovation, is that the design isn't concerned with aesthetic consistency. The institution is housed in a historic mansion once owned by the Carnegie family, and yet the exhibitions focus on contemporary design objects and ideas. The square display cases, interactive touch-screen tables, and suspended

ceiling lights sit starkly against noble woodcarvings and moldings that hark back to the building's turn-of-the-20th-century origins. But the contrasts don't distract from the success of the museum’s transformation.

No Country for Old Men: Together Canes, 2012. Designed and produced by Francesca Lanzavecchia (Italian, b. 1984) and Hunn Wai (British, b. 1980), Lanzavecchia + Wai (Italy). Maple, lacquered MDF. Courtesy of the designers.

Photography: Davide Farabegoli. © Cooper Hewitt.

Reopening on the 112th anniversary of the day steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and his family moved into the home, Cooper Hewitt brings innovation to each of its 10 opening exhibitions.Making Design and the Process Lab encourage visitors to touch, hold, and play with everyday objects and dynamic technology. Interactive screens allow people to create better forms for quotidian items like a shopping cart or a cane, inviting all visitors to innovate like a product designer. The idea is to inspire people to learn about and create objects where function and design meet, solving real-world design problems based on characteristics like people’s heights and abilities.

These interactive technologies also allow visitors to explore the museum’s expansive collection. In the new Immersion Room, you can search from 200 images of wall coverings dating back to 1780—with designs by Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright, and

William Morris among them—and project them on the surrounding walls; or you can create your own wallpaper to display.

Installation view: Immersion Room. Photo: Matt Flynn © 2014 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

The new space also highlights precious objects dating as far back as the 5th century. The second floor is now dedicated to the museum’s permanent collection, showcasing a variety of objects like birdcages and textiles. Go downstairs and you'll find the exhibit Maira Kalman Selects, in which the artist and designer Maira Kalman deepens our understanding of how design affects personal histories. She muses on artifacts like a pair of 19th century linen slippers and Abraham Lincoln’s watch, exploring how objects carry memories. It's a theme that's carried throughout the museum as a whole. By emphasizing the ways design objects—both the practical and the ornate—affect our everyday lives, the renewed Cooper Hewitt has become a true 21st-century institution.

http://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2014-12-12/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museumreopens-nyc-new-york-city

Morning News: Delta Says 2015 Will Be ‘Fantastic’

By Paul Brady Condé Nast Traveler December 12, 2014

With low fuel prices and booming demand, airlines are ready for a great 2015.

The CEOs of Delta and Southwest said, during separate events Thursday, that lower oil prices won’t necessarily translate into lower fares, David Koenig reports. Delta CEO Richard Anderson did say that "2015 will be a fantastic year,” in part because of how much his airline will save on fuel. (AP) Here’s a hitch in Thursday’s predictions that airfares could fall in 2015: Global passenger traffic at airports this year is up 4.9 percent through October, according to Airports Council International, a trade group. Growth in the AsiaPacific and Middle East has topped seven percent, and, “on the whole, the African continent continues to experience a strong recovery in passenger traffic,” ACI reports. In the U.S., growth was a slightly more modest 4.4 percent. So, from the airline perspective, why lower fares at all? (ACI) Southwest announced that it could start flying to Belize next year, from Houston, a new international destination for the airline. It also applied to serve Cabo San Lucas, Cancun, Mexico City, and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and San Jose, Costa Rica from Houston before the end of 2015. (USA Today and The Dallas Morning News) Two contractors and one crew member aboard the Oceania Insignia died as a result of an engine room fire while the ship was docked in St. Lucia. No passengers were hurt, and the rest of the cruise was canceled. (NBC 6 South Florida) ANA will add a daily flight between Houston and Tokyo next June. (USA Today)

Lyft will start offering its carpooling service, called Lyft Line in New York today. It’s the third city after San Francisco and Los Angeles to get the option, which pairs drivers and riders heading in the same direction for what Lyft says is “up to 60% less than an original Lyft ride.” (Lyft) Amy Plitt shares ten reasons to visit Queens right now, on the heels of the borough’s coronation as Lonely Planet’s ideal destination for 2015. (Condé Nast Traveler) Eurostar will start new service to Avignon, Lyon, and Marseille from London on May 1, 2015. (Eurostar) New footbridges on Bermuda’s Railway Trail will open to the public on Saturday, making available some sections of the mixed-use path that have been “impenetrable over the last 30 years,” The Royal Gazette says. (The Royal Gazette) The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum reopens today in New York after “a three-year, $91 million renovation of its home, the Carnegie Mansion.

But the changes to the museum are far from just cosmetic,” Elizabeth Stamp writes. (Architecture Digest) The de Young Museum in San Francisco is offering Google Glass guides for the current Keith Haring show. (Tnooz) “A furor in South Korea over an airline executive who ordered a flight back to the gate after a contretemps over macadamia nuts continued Friday, as the head of the airline apologized on live television and said that the executive— his daughter—had been stripped of all her executive posts,” writes Choe SangHun from Seoul. (NYT) http://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2014-12-12/morning-news-delta-says-2015-will-be-fantastic

December 2014

January 2015

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2014/12/141222-Cooper-Hewitt-Goes-from-Dowdy-toDigital.asp

December 2014

http://archrecord.construction.com/community/editorial/2014/1412.asp

National Treasure

By Aileen Kwun Surface November 2014

Give Good Design: Metropolis’s 2014 Gift Guide

By Metropolis Editors Metropolis December 16, 2014

We'll admit it—this gift guide is last minute. (If you're reading this, you're running out of time.) But every well-designed object on this year's guide, from cutting-edge gadgets to handcrafted classics, is well worth the wait. Many of these items can be ordered now to ensure delivery before Christmas morning. Others, alas, cannot, but we advise that a fantastic gift that arrives late is better than no gift at all. So dive into our gift guide, and start showing your loved ones some well-deserved appreciation.

Mansion Playing Cards, $20 These should be purchased at the Cooper Hewitt’s new gift shop after a visit to the museum’s recently reopened galleries. The graphics, by New York designers Boym Partners, transform the Cooper Hewitt’s Fifth Avenue mansion into a tableau of emoticons. —Samuel Medina

http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/December-2014/Give-Good-Design-Metropoliss2014-Gift-Guide/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0#artanc

http://www.metropolismag.com/Caroline-Baumann-At-Home-in-the-Design-Museum/

Special Issue / Winter 2015

http://www.themagazineantiques.com/articles/more-than-a-treasure-box/

New York's Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum reopens after a bold makeover

By Stephanie Murg Wallpaper* December 13, 2014

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Library was moved from the mansion to the museum-owned townhouses around the corner in 2011 as part of the renovation project. Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution

On December 12, 1902, Andrew, Louise, and five-year-old Margaret Carnegie were moving into their newly completed home, designed by architectural firm Babb, Cook and Willard to fulfill the steel magnate's wish for 'the most modest, plainest, and most roomy house in New York'. What a difference 112 years makes. Now, the former Carnegie mansion has just reopened to the public as the new and improved Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Established in 1897 by the collecting granddaughters of industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper as the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts and Decoration, the museum has occupied the landmark Upper East Side mansion since 1976, although then-director Lisa Taylor confessed that the museum had outgrown the place ('a very strong building, not a very beautiful building')

before it had even moved in. Plans for renovation and expansion began taking shape in 2004, and a design dream team – stacked with previous winners of the museum's National Design Awards such as Gluckman Mayner Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Hood Design, Local Projects, and Pentagram – was assembled, along with funding of $91 million.

A decade in the making, the new Cooper Hewitt has gained not only 60% more exhibition space but also the integrated, expansive feel of a true museum, without sacrificing the neo-Georgian domestic charms and exquisite gardens (opening in June 2015) of its unique home. Gone is the impression of an institution forced to tiptoe around grandmother's house with jerry-rigged accommodations to modern building codes.

In its place is an assured fusion of the traditional (a grand wooden staircase, newly revealed Caen stone, the meticulously restored teak room designed by Lockwood de Forest) and the contemporary (a new fourth-floor gallery proportioned to museum dimensions, interactive tables, a smart pen distributed upon arrival that allows visitors to 'collect and create'). 'This renovation allowed us to pause, to take a look at everything that defines Cooper Hewitt, and to ensure that our purpose - to inspire, educate, and empower people through design - informs everything that we do,' says director Caroline Baumann. 'We're aiming to make design fun, illuminating, and immersive.'

That goal is apparent in many of the ten inaugural exhibitions and installations. Among these juxtaposition-heavy shows is an exploration of the changing relationship between designers and users (from Henry Dreyfuss-designed telephones to 3D-printed prosthetic limbs) and the exquisitely presented 'Maira Kalman Selects', in which the author, designer, and artist has created a room-sized collage of objects, including a Bauhaus-era glass teapot, lemon-hued kidskin slippers from the 1830s, and Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch, accompanied by the sound of its ticking-that suggest the sequence of a life, from birth to death. 'The pieces that I chose [from the Cooper Hewitt collection] were based on one thing only – a gasp of delight,' says Kalman. 'Isn't that the only way to curate a life?'

http://www.wallpaper.com/design/new-yorks-cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum-reopensafter-a-bold-makeover/8241#110490

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Makes Its Grand Re-Opening in New York City

By Jimmy Stamp Smithsonian.com December 12, 2014

The old and the new crash into each other beautifully in the former Carnegie mansion

In a Georgian mansion on New York’s Upper East Side, a lamp made of shattered ceramic crockery abstracted into a frozen explosion hangs over an gilded porcelain jewel cabinet, artfully adorned with images of birds and flowers and ancient gods. In the next room, an iPod shares space with a typewriter, and a Russian lithograph in a

custom case designed by one of New York’s top architecture firms. Despite spanning centuries and styles these groupings of disparate objects coalesce with surprising grace, provoking visitors to really think about just what design is. These are only two of many such moments realized by the thoughtful curators and designers behind the newly reopened, revamped and reinvigorated Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

America’s only museum devoted to historic and contemporary design was established in 1897 by Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, granddaughters of industrialist Peter Cooper, as part of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Science and Art. Their aim was to create a “practical working laboratory” where visitors could learn about the “arts of decoration.” They succeeded. In 1967,the museum became a part of the Smithsonian, and in 1976, it moved into the landmark Fifth Avenue mansion built for steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). Three years ago, the museum closed for a massive renovation and, when it reopens to the public on December 12, it will reaffirm the Hewitt Sisters’ legacy with 60 percent more exhibition space, along with a new focus on cutting edge technology and public engagement that aims to transform museum-goers into museum-users.

The new Cooper Hewitt opens with a series of exhibitions that embody the museum's mission to "inspire and empower people through design." The abovementioned items are part of Making Design, which brings together nearly 400 objects drawn from the museum's vast collection, carefully selected and arranged by its curators to provide an overview of five basic design elements: line, form, texture, pattern, and color.

Inspired by the work of industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss (1904-1972), but encompassing today's hackers and disruptors, the Beautiful Users exhibit, along with Cooper Hewitt's hands-on Process Lab, shows how designers develop their work around the human body and human behavior, with process sketches, models and prototypes. This collection of 120 objects illustrates the concept of "user-centered design." and shows off the new modular cases designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

To help visitors create their own stories, Cooper Hewitt created its own tools.

Throughout the museum, a series of new interactive features enhance the experience of every exhibition. Foremost among them is The Pen, which won’t be available to visitors until early 2015. An alternative to passive audio guides, The Pen is a digital stylus given to every visitor to help them interact with the objects on display. Here's how it works: every wall label includes a small cross symbol and an identical symbol is on the top of The Pen—when the two are pressed together, The Pen vibrates to signal the interaction, and the object is saved to your personal online collection, which is keyed to either your ticket or a unique user profile.

Made specifically for the Cooper Hewitt by a team of designers and fabricators,.It also interacts with the new digital touchscreen tables found throughout the museum, though a finger works just as well. A continuous stream of circular images scrolls down the screen, each image depicting a detail of a different object from the collection. It's beautiful and hypnotic and fun to guess what kind of object will be revealed as you drag a circle to the center of the screen as it expands into a full high-resolution image.

When an image is selected, the table works as a virtual gallery wall, displaying catalog information and historical data, with the added digital benefit of category and color tags.

Looking at an 18th century red Chinese vase and want to see other vases? Or other red objects? Just click the appropriate tag. Like the wall texts, you can also touch The Pen

to the table to save the vase to your collection for later reference. The tables offer other interactive experiences as well. You can explore the museum’s offerings by randomly drawing lines or shapes on the surface and letting the computer bring up an object that corresponds to your scribbling. Feeling inspired? Use the tables software to create your buildings, lamps, chairs, or hats. Strangely, the streamlined modern tables don't seem too out of place in even the most ornate spaces because everywhere you look there is a pleasing blend of the old with the new.

Nowhere is this clearer than the Immersion Room, where you can experience, in virtual situ, every wallcovering in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection. Just bring up one of the wallpapers on the interactive table, push a button, and—voila!—digital projections transform the walls of the room with patterns that can be adjusted or customized. Or, if you’re feeling especially creative, you can create your own.

All this technology, supported and complemented by the Cooper Hewitt's new website and digital collections, affords a deeper understanding and appreciation of the more than 200,000 objects in the museum's collection. But the greatest object in the collection is the building, and it is best understood and appreciated simply by visiting.

A small room off the main 2nd floor gallery that once housed the former Carnegie Family Library has been stunningly restored as part of the renovation. In homage to designer and painter Lockwood de Forest (1845-1932), who created the remarkably rich room covered in intricately carved teak Indian paneling and ornate stencil work, the room shows off his work alongside that of painter Frederic Church, his teacher and mentor.

At the end of the hall, where the Carnegies once slept, The Hewitt Sisters Collect tells the story of Sarah and Eleanor and the early days of the museum now known as Cooper Hewitt. Inspired by Paris's Musée des Arts Décoratifs and London's Victoria & Albert Museum, the sisters sought to elevate the status of the decorative arts in America, and traveled across Europe collecting examples of exceptional artistic or technical merit to bring back for exhibition. From block prints to birdcages, the collection was eclectic from the start, embracing almost everything as design and establishing a method for a museum that today exhibits a 3D-printed prosthetic limb next to Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch.

Maira Kalman Selects continues Cooper Hewitt's series of guest-curated exhibitions.

Artist and author Maira Kalman fills Carnegie's former drawing room with objects selected from the museum's vast collection alongside her own personal pieces. The objects themselves are fascinating, though sometimes curious--a pair of trousers worn by conductor Arturo Toscanini, for example—and the exhibit is very personal, making it both delightfully idiosyncratic and somewhat impenetrable. But this serves as a reminder that we interpret everything in context of our personal experiences. And in a design museum like Cooper Hewitt, visitors have a lot more direct personal experience with the everyday objects and tools on display than they do with most of the art hanging

a block away at the Guggenheim. "Design is so much about connection and references,” says McCarty. “No one makes something in complete isolation but is somehow influenced by the culture around them and the materials they have access too.”

When Andrew Carnegie built his mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 91st Street, he famously told his architects he wanted the “most modest, plainest, and most roomy house in New York.” Although today we might not find a four-story, 64-room mansion “modest,” by the standards of the Gilded Age’s millionaires Carnegie’s brick, stone and steel home was downright humble. It’s also humble by the standards of today’s megamuseums. But that modesty, tinged as it is with the occasional flamboyant ornamentation, works for a museum like the Cooper Hewitt. The intimacy of the domestic interior reifies our personal connections to the objects on display—we know these things, we’ve seen most of them around our house—while the high coffered ceilings, spacious wood-paneled rooms, and general formality of the spaces give these objects an import that forces us to pay a little more attention, to think about them a little more. The exhibition designers and curators take great advantage of their renewed spaces and bring out the best in the building while allowing the building to draw out new aspects of the objects on display. The broken ceramic lamp and jewel cabinet would just wouldn't have the same effect of they were installed in a white box gallery.

This dynamic, complementary relationship between object and space and old and new is a result of the brilliant collaborative efforts of the "dream team" brought together by the Cooper Hewitt, who transformed the mansion itself into an exhibition showcase of the work of talented designers. "Rather than just having two design teams, we wanted to have a sampling of American design firms represented here," says the museum’s director Caroline Baumann. Three architecture firms were involved with the project. Gluckman Mayner Architects’ primary role was to design the new spaces—the modern white galleries brought alive by the exhibitions, the cafe, the classroom and lab spaces—and plan new circulation, including the naturally lit public stairwell that links the four floors of galleries. Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners have been involved since the Cooper Hewitt started planning this renovation in 2006. They oversaw the revitalization of the original structure and the seamless integration of modern building systems, making sure the entire building is safe, efficient and accessible. The fact that their work is largely invisible is a testament to their success. Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the gift shop, admissions desk, 90th street entrance canopy, and modular exhibition casework, which was engineered and manufactured by Goppion.

Landscape Architects Hood Design revitalized the museum’s massive garden. Thinc designed the Tools exhibition. Pentagram and Village are responsible for the museum’s new graphic identity as well as the clear and colorful signage throughout the building, written in Cooper Hewitt’s custom, open-sourced typeface. And don’t forget everyone involved with the interactive media, website and digital collections.

Every design project is a complex undertaking requiring collaboration and coordination between multiple parties—owners, architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, consultants, the list goes on. But rarely do so many high profile designers with strong

ideas and unique voices perform together as a pitch perfect choir rather than devolve into a disharmonic shouting match. The fact that the museum feels like a cohesive, singular experience is a testament to both the skill of the conductor, Cooper Hewitt, and the strength of the original composition—the Carnegie Mansion. The renovated Cooper Hewitt building does what I think all good architecture should do: to engage the public while expressing both the traditions of the discipline and current technological possibilities.

With its new exhibitions, new galleries, and new technologies, this is a museum that will keep you coming back. And that's the idea, the mission that dates back to 1897: to create a "practical working laboratory," a museum that you'll use.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-designmuseum-makes-its-grand-re-opening-new-york-city-180953598/?no-ist

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is now open

By Dana Varinsky Time Out New York December 12, 2014

Installation view: "Maira Kalman Selects." Photo: Matt Flynn © 2014 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Matt Flynn

Design geeks, grab your pens! After a three-year renovation, the Upper East Side’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, reopened today.

Housed in the Andrew Carnegie mansion, Cooper Hewitt’s collection focuses on the way design has impacted daily life over the past 3,000 years. One of two Smithsonian institutions in New York City, the new space is 60 percent larger and gives visitors an immersive, participatory experience. Its 10 exhibits include a look into how tools from hand axes to 3-D printers have extended human capabilities, plus an Immersion Room, where you can project coverings or original designs onto the walls.

Visitors will also get an interactive pen device, which they can use to scan tags on objects in the museum, adding them to a personal online collection. The pen allows museumgoers to navigate interactive displays and create designs at hands-on digital tables.

And how does a design museum celebrate its opening? By creating its own typeface, of course. The eponymous Cooper Hewitt, a “contemporary sans serif,” can be downloaded and installed via the museum’s website, which, yes, uses the new font.

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is at 2 E 91st St at Fifth Ave, and open Monday–Friday and Sunday from 10am–6pm; and Saturday from 10am–9pm. $18, students $9, under 18 free.

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/the-cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum-is-nowopen

The Smithsonian's Design Museum Just Got Some High-­‐Tech Upgrades

By Sean O’Kane The Verge March 11, 2015

Technology isn't just about the device you're reading this on, it's also fundamentally changing the places we go and the experiences we encounter. For example, Disney has a new program that lets you set restaurant preferences and pick your favorite rides before you even get to its parks, and uses an RFID wristband when you're there so that the park employees know who you are and what you like. It also logs the things you do so you can look back on the experience after. Last month, we saw how Nike's Jordan brand was using a similar technology at a pop-­‐up shop during the NBA's All-­‐Star weekend. Cultural institutions are now getting in on this game, too, and one in particular is changing what it means to be a museum.

The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York just reopened its doors in December after more than three years of renovations. In the time that it was closed, the museum's operators made a number of changes — not only was more space carved out for the exhibitions, but three big technological features were added that have fundamentally changed the experience.

First, they installed a number of touchscreen 4K displays that serve as interactive tables. They can be found in 84-­‐, 55-­‐, and 32-­‐inch sizes throughout the museum, and they serve as a window into the vast collection of items that the museum has access to via the Smithsonian archives. Items in the collection, currently on display or not, can be called up on the table with all the corresponding information.

There's a wealth of options for exploring the collection, too. You can search by motif or related colors. There's also a stream of objects that runs through the middle of each display, away from the immediate reach of users, that calls up random items from the archives. If something in the stream catches your eye, you just lean forward and pluck it out. When you drag it over to where you're standing, all its corresponding information appears.

That's just one of the impressive ways that the interactive nature of the tables gets shown off. You can also draw a shape — any shape — and an object from the museum's collection will appear. The museum also lets you use the tables to create your own object; the UI has options for different materials and colors, and as you draw on a grid, a live 3D rendering appears next to it.

The second big addition to the museum is what's known as the "Immersion Room."

In it, visitors can browse Cooper Hewitt's infamously vast collection of wallpapers on adjoining floor-­‐to-­‐ceiling screens. Before this, only a select amount of wallpapers could be displayed at any time. You can even create your own by using one of the 4K tables found right in the middle of the room.

But the most impressive addition to the museum is what's simply called the Pen. It's a smartly designed rubberized wand with a pen-­‐shaped tip at one end and an NFC antenna at the other. Not only does it work as a capacitive stylus on all of the tables, but it can be used around the museum: each item on display at the museum that now has an NFC tag next to it. When you find something you like, or want to read more about later, just tap the back of the pen to the tag. Lights on the Pen illuminate and a slight vibration confirms that the item's been recognized. You're essentially building your own personal collection as you browse the museum, and you're given a URL when you leave that lets you access that collection (or add to it when you return).

This isn't a terribly new idea; a few museums have been using NFC technology for a number of years now. But instead of relying on visitors to have NFC-­‐enabled phones, the Pen makes for a much more cohesive experience, and it's something that the museum's directors believe any visitor can pick up and understand. It also plays extremely well with the interactive tables. Not only can it be used as a stylus, but you can tap the NFC tag to the table and watch the collection you've built spill out onto the table.

It may sound like a small change, but even during our brief after-­‐hours demo back in December, it was easy to see how powerful a paradigm shift this could be. A simple stylus combined with a deep database of the museum's collection means that the

museum is no longer just a few hundred objects inside four walls. It's an experience that can follow you anywhere.

Tables also have NFC tags where the pen can be used to spill visitor's personal collections out onto the displays.

The "stream" flows through the middle of each display, and is a way for visitors to discover objects that they may never have known about otherwise.

All you have to do is just drag an object from the stream to the spot in front of you to learn more about it.

Each object that you browse brings up a number of related objects curated

by the museum's staff.

Some of the most fun you can have at the tables is achieved by drawing random shapes and seeing which objects the software pulls from the archives.

Pen has an NFC antenna at one end, and is a capacitive stylus at the other.

Each pen has a wrist strap, and is designed in a way that people of any age can learn how to use it just from watching other visitors.

Each item on display has a crosshair next to it. All you have to do is tap the pen to it and the item is added to your collection. Lights and a small vibration signal that it was successfully added.

Early prototypes of the Pen are on display at the museum as well.

The Pen is actually powered by three AAA batteries, which should last for months at a time.

The Pen went through many iterations before the museum settled on the final design. At one point early in the process, the staff toyed with the idea of NFC rings.

One of the new features at the museum is the Immersion Room.

4K projectors illuminate the floor-­‐to-­‐ceiling screens.

Aaron Cope, the head engineer for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, takes us through a tour of the wallpaper archives.

You can also create your own wallpaper design. The walls change in real time as you draw, and at the end you can save the design with the Pen.

In the Immersion Room you can either create your own wallpaper or pull existing ones from the archives with the stream.

Cope whips up a wallpaper design of his own.

The Immersion Room lives up to its name, but you can't stay long. Each visitor has a five-­‐minute time limit.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/11/8182051/smithsonian-­‐cooper-­‐hewitt-­‐ design-­‐museum-­‐reopening-­‐pen-­‐4k

I Saw the Future at New York's Uncanny Smithsonian Museum

By Adam Clark Estes Gizmodo.com March 12, 2015

It's weird to see a working Nest thermostat on display at a Smithsonian museum in Manhattan. It's even weirder to tinker with the gadget, pushing buttons and changing settings. But touching and tinkering with technology is the Cooper Hewitt future museum's specialty.

You could consider the Cooper Hewitt to be the Smithsonian's computerized crown jewel. The century-­‐old design museum recently finished a three-­‐year-­‐long renovation that gutted the Gilded Age mansion that once belonged to Andrew Carnegie and, perhaps more importantly, completely reinvented how a Smithsonian institution deals with data.

Put simply, the Cooper Hewitt put its entire archives online, free for anyone to view, and employed 21st century technologies like NFC and touchscreens to give visitors more access to that data than ever before. The whole experience is rooted deeply in an elegant open API and guided by a custom-­‐built "pen," a magic wand of sorts that lets you interact with every single object in the museum.

Building the museum of the future isn't just about tossing a bunch of technology into an old mansion, though. The Cooper Hewitt's own museum futurist, Seb Chan, recently explained to me how it's as much about a change in philosophy as it is a question of technology. And when I found myself playing with historically important gadgets, sending data about exhibits to a personalized webpage, and watching a robot draw my face in sand, I started to understand what he meant.

The House That Carnegie Built Just a few blocks from the Guggenheim, the Cooper Hewitt sits on a conspicuously lush patch of land like a country home that got stuck in traffic on Fifth Avenue. This was Andrew Carnegie's intention. The cherub-­‐cheeked steel magnate picked the far uptown location so that he'd have enough land for sprawling gardens. Nevertheless, it wasn't the landscaping that set this mansion apart from the rest. It was technologically advanced features like full electricity, an elevator, and climate control.

When the Cooper Hewitt took over the space in 1970, amenities like these had become pretty pedestrian (except for the elevator). The spirit of innovation stuck around the house, though. After all, the museum had been founded by the granddaughters of American industrialist Peter Cooper on a forward-­‐thinking idea.

Museums shouldn't be designed to preserve precious objects. The more heroic mission should be to preserve the information that those objects possess. It's a perfect mission for a design museum, when you think about it.

That mission endures at the Cooper Hewitt to this day. As part of its massive overhaul, the museum put every single object in its collection of over 200,000 objects online. The collection is sorted by people, by country, and even by color.

Each object gets a permalink, a detail that's central to the new pen (a.k.a. "magic wand") and the visitor's ability to save details about their experience to web. All of this information, Chan says, is the property of the American people.

Because Information Wants to Be Free When I met Chan, he was wearing bright orange shoelaces and an even brighter smile. The Australian data evangelist, technology enthusiast, and former DJ came to Cooper Hewitt after a stint at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. (They have an API, too.) Chan now heads up Cooper Hewitt Labs, a small team of visionaries that includes former Flickr engineer and digital artist Aaron Straup Cope. As we walked around the museum, we spotted some of the Cooper Hewitt Labs team dissecting the software on one of the museum's new touchscreen table tops. It almost looked like they were tweaking an instrument panel on a space ship.

It was an exciting day for Chan and his team. That morning was the very first time Cooper Hewitt visitors could make use of the NFC-­‐enabled pen. The cigar-­‐sized piece of technology is linked to each individual's unique ticket data and its corresponding spot in the Cooper Hewitt databases.

When you're walking around the exhibitions and find a pretty thing that you want to learn more about, you just tap the pen on a special "+" sign by the placard. That basically bookmarks the object's permalink so that you can look back at your list of favorite pretty things after you've left the museum.

"Giving every visitor one of these flips their expectations," Chan told me, holding up the pen proudly. And it immediately made sense to me. It's kind of like an anti-­‐audio guide since it compels you to interact with the exhibits.

I'm a desperate museum-­‐goer, the kind of person who takes a notebook to an art museum so that I can write down the dates of my favorite paintings and research the time period when I get home. In the smartphone era, I've been taking pictures of placards, intending to circle back to my favorite exhibits. I'm also a button pusher.

When I go to a science museum, I want to see how things work. If there's a Van de Graaff generator, I want to touch it so I can feel the static electricity pulse through my body and make my hair stand up. I'm desperate for more information, more interaction.

The Cooper Hewitt delivers on both fronts. This idea of appealing to museum-­‐goers' potentially infinite curiosity and interactivity is central to the whole experience.

Chan said that the new design was supposed to make the Cooper Hewitt more "useful." He said the challenge was "making it an experiential space and not an informational space."

A Museum You Can Take Home With You At first I thought Chan had contradicted himself. Wasn't the Cooper Hewitt supposed to showcase the Smithsonian's information, the information that belongs to all Americans? Then what's the deal with redesigning the museum around some half-­‐baked concept of an experience?

Turns out, it's a pretty good deal. Tickets to the Cooper Hewitt aren't exactly cheap at $18 a pop, but of the information about the collection is free and online. You can look through page after page of beautiful chairs and unusual handles and crazy wallpapers from the cheap comfort of your own home. If you want to sit in one of those chairs or hold one of those handles, you can buy a ticket and do just that. The museum makes it worth your while, too, with interactive features that eclipse any

other museum I've ever visited.

Take the Immersion Room, for instance. This got a lot of buzz when the Cooper Hewitt initially reopened back in December. The Immersion Room is a windowless chamber with giant projectors that display the museum's huge collection of wallpaper. Instead of staring at lonely strips of paper, the technology shows you what the wallpaper looks like in its native habitat. You can even create your own wallpaper, save it to your collection, and share it with your friends.

Then there are those tables. The pen isn't just an NFC reader; it's also a capacitive stylus that works with these massive touchscreen displays. You can browse through the Cooper Hewitt's collections not only by searching for your designer but also by drawing shapes with the pen. Using the museum's robust API, the table then finds objects in the collection that are that shape. It also gives you the ability to draw an idea and turn it into a concept. Chan made a squiggle with the pen and quickly turned it into a rather attractive lampshade.

I'd read about all of these things before I got the chance to visit the Cooper Hewitt. It sounded like buzzworthy but ultimately run-­‐of-­‐the-­‐mill interactive exhibits I've seen (and forgotten about) at other museums. There's something about that pen, though.

There's something exciting about this idea that your visit to the museum will be saved in a database that only you can access—and you can easily delete if you so choose. It's like a digital shoebox of your favorite pretty things, some of which you created.

By the end of our tour, I was sold. The Cooper Hewitt Labs crew doesn't just want to change how their museum works. They want to change how all museums work.

That's probably why they explain all of their projects in detail on a blog and became the first museum to waive all copyrights to certain pieces in its collection through a Creative Commons "CC Zero" licenses.

I did shutter a couple of times, when he talked about how the museum was designed to be selfie-­‐friendly. There were even signs that said "Photography is encouraged" with a special note: "No Selfie Sticks But Selfies Are Fine!" Good call on the selfie stick ban, but selfie-­‐takers don't need that kind of encouragement.

Then I got a little less grumpy and realized that the selfie stuff acted as a rather poignant metaphor for how Cooper Hewitt is changing our whole conception of a museum visit. Just as social media makes everything about you—sometimes to a damaging degree—this Smithsonian outpost is trying to personalize the museum experience. And while I think this selfie trend is pretty obnoxious, a lot of people like it. People like remembering where they've been, and they love showing their friends. The Cooper Hewitt experience is designed to make those two things easier, all while opening up access to information for everyone. All museums should work like this!

After I said goodbye to Chan, I wandered into the "Beautiful Users" exhibition. This is where I found the Nest. Nearby, I saw the first laptop ever invented—invented by former Cooper Hewitt director Bill Moggridge, nonetheless. Moggridge, the founder of the legendary design firm IDEO, coined the term "interactive design." Moggridge is the one who said, "It doesn't occur to most people that everything is designed— that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed."

I was thinking about this idea, as I stood there tapping away on the Nest. What earned this futuristic thermostat a spot in a Smithsonian exhibit isn't merely the fact that it's pretty. It's there because it's useful. The half-­‐century old Honeywell Round thermostat on the wall next to the Nest is there for the same reason: good design.

You'd expect as much at a design museum.

It wasn't until the next day that it all came together. Moggridge was the director of the Cooper Hewitt from the early stages of the renovations until his death in 2012.

His legacy is everywhere still. In his deeply influential book Designing Interactions, the late luminary wrote:

What makes humans special first and foremost is that we can model the world, and we can predict the future. Then we can imagine the future.

When you think of the Smithsonian, you probably don't usually think about the future. But the Cooper Hewitt is doing something refreshingly futuristic. It's enlisting technology to make information more free. It's also making the experience of a museum visit not only less fleeting but also a little bit immortal.

Imagine if all museums did this…

Photos by Michael Hession

http://gizmodo.com/i-­‐saw-­‐the-­‐future-­‐at-­‐new-­‐yorks-­‐uncanny-­‐smithsonian-­‐ museu-­‐1690767614

The Museum of the Future Is Here

By Robinson Meyer The Atlantic January 20, 2015

Tessellated smiley faces in the Cooper Hewitt’s “immersion room,” which projects decorative patterns on the wall and lets users design their own (Robinson Meyer/The Atlantic)

Very soon, every visitor to the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s recently reopened design museum, will receive a giant pen. This pen is not really a pen. On the table, it looks like a gray plastic crayon the size of a turkey baster. In the hand, it feels pleasing, chunky, hefty like a toddler’s rubber ball. And at the museum, it does something magical.

Next to every object on-display at the Cooper Hewitt is a small pattern that looks like the origin point of the coordinate plane. When the pen touches it, the digital record of that object is added to the visitor’s personal museum collection. When they leave, they will have to return the pen, but information about and high-resolution photos of the object will be waiting for them.

To people who photograph placards when they visit museums—a group to which I belong—the pen is a godsend. It anticipates a need and executes it; it is a straightforward, useful object. But it’s something more. The pen does something that countless companies, organizations, archives, and libraries are trying to do: It bridges the digital and the physical.

“They don’t want to have the burden of this preservation forever.”

Last month, the Cooper Hewitt welcomed visitors again after a three-year-long closeddoor renovation. Its leaders were rethinking what a design museum should be. And a five-member team inside it—Cooper Hewitt Labs—was thinking about questions which the pen addresses, questions about how to bind the vast possibilities of the digital with the finite fact of the physical.

It is a good time for the museum to reopen, for design has rarely been so central to the American popular conversation. But its leaders have succeeded in something that should interest more than the chambray-wearing set. The Cooper Hewitt has transformed into an organization not unlike Wikipedia, Pinterest, or, for that matter, The Atlantic: Somewhere between a media and a tech firm, it is a Thing That Puts Stuff on the Internet.

Or, more precisely, A Thing That Puts Things on the Internet.

But to get to that point, the museum has made sweeping decisions about who it wants to serve, how it should serve them, and what that “service” should look like. The leaders of the Cooper Hewitt—a national steward of well-designed things—have ultimately had to shift their understanding of what a thing is in the first place. ***

Cooper Hewitt

Excepting the ones who are alive now, every human being who ever lived has died. Their belongings—the objects that filled their life and helped give it meaning—all met a similar fate. Some were destroyed. Some found new owners. And a tiny, tiny fraction of a fraction were saved. They would be preserved—they belonged in a museum.

If you wanted to see those objects, you had to go to that museum. In glass cases and on wooden shelves, you could survey the stuff that people made or used or prized. Saving this old stuff was so important that cities and states established institutions to do it, libraries and archives and museums that made sense of the receding past. Their job—to steward the products of the past into the unfolding present—was tough, but possible. As long as the government lasted, so would the objects.

“All jokes about politics aside, the United States isn’t going anywhere, and the Smithsonian is the national museum,” Aaron Straup Cope tells me. “By definition, it not only traffics in the past, it has to traffic in the near future. It has to keep an eye on it, it has to have some sense.”

Cope is the lead engineer at Cooper Hewitt Labs. For years now, I’d come across intriguing updates from him and his colleagues. Led by Seb Chan—a prominent Australian thinker on museums, who’s also a DJ and music journalist—Cooper Hewitt Labs seemed to be spinning a textile from that near future and releasing it strand by strand. A blog post here, a demo there: The ideas and software they put out represented such a complete vision for what a museum could be that I wasn’t able to grasp it all at once. There was a sophisticated idealism in their output—an idealism about what the Internet could be, especially for public institutions hooked up to it—that felt rare, precious, and vital.

The museum’s magical pen was made by GE and other firms. (Cooper Hewitt)

I, at last, got to visit the museum’s physical premises in November. It was in its frenzied final days of hibernation, and it smelled like sawdust. The Cooper Hewitt resides in Andrew Carnegie’s old Manhattan mansion, an idiosyncratic testament to industrial domination that’s now next door to the curvaceous Guggenheim. The building sports all the marks of its fin de siècle manufacture: carved ceilings, rococo columns, marbled steps. But it is also a recently renovated contemporary museum, so sometimes you climb those stone steps (carpeted with maroon velvet) and find yourself in a hall of pristine white drywall splashed with huge sans serifs. It’s steampunk, but it’s also Eamespunk.

In this labyrinth of hardwood and cement, the Labs office looks like any other crammed New York tech outfit. Sheets printed with 64-point black Helvetica were taped to the wall and whiteboard. Desks had the regulation iMac, hand-scrawled notes, and (sometimes) a vinyl figurine or two. There was a DSLR and a half-disassembled Raspberry Pi. The Labs team is small, just five people. Cope has had many lives, including a stint at San Francisco star firm Stamen Design and a “self-imposed sabbatical” where he made parallel copies of private social networks, but his most famous gig is as a senior engineer at Flickr. It was his code that let users geotag their photos and hook them into third-party apps like Foursquare. Seb Chan came from the Powerhouse, Sydney’s premier design and science museum. Katie Shelly produces films and multimedia for the museum;she’s also made an all-graphic cookbook. Micah Walter was at the Cooper Hewitt first, the museum’s old webmaster, but before that he was a photojournalist in the Middle East. And Sam Brenner’s projects have ranged from an RPG about LiveJournal to an Internet-connected fantasy football trophy.

When I visited, I talked to the Labs team in their office and then toured the then notquite-finished mansion. We talked about the museum first—the physical one we were in.

Unlike leaders of other New York museums, who are investing in events, Chan (and the Cooper Hewitt generally) believe the heart of the museum is in its collection and its visitors. In other words: its stuff and its people.

“They don’t want to have the burden of this preservation forever,” he said of the increasingly event-focused Museum of Modern Art, 40 blocks south. “The beauty here is: We’re the Smithsonian. We don’t have a choice. No matter what other staff in this building might say, we don’t have a choice but to keep all this stuff forever.”

The museum will forever be committed to its stuff. But it has to have a more enlivening presence, he believes, than placards and shelves. Cope held up his smartphone at one point and pointed at it.

“Everyone walks in with one of these,” he said. “We’re gonna have to find a different way to air-quote compete, so why don’t we just try to meet people halfway? All the visitors arrive with superpowers.” ***

Tall Green Bloom, a 3-D printed urn which joined the museum’s collection in 2013 (Cooper Hewitt)

When visitors come to the Cooper Hewitt, what do they want to see? This is the question the entire museum staff has asked itself. It has decided to offer them something that can’t be found anywhere else.

So it gives them, first, yes, physical objects from the collection—the artisanal and industrial specimens that distinguish the Cooper Hewitt alone. A 3-D printed urn, Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster, and small model staircases built by Victorian woodworkers greet the visitors on the mansion’s first and second floor. (“People love those freaking tiny staircases,” Shelly said.)

The Cooper Hewitt also wants to teach visitors about design-as-craft, so it presents science-museum-like interactive exhibits on the design process. It also has an expansive upstairs exhibit on tools and tools-making, that includes a “sand selfie” portrait-making robot.

But the real treats are in the museum’s interactives that draw from its collection. There’s an “immersion room,” which projects patterns from the museum’s expansive wallpaper

archive on the wall. Visitors can also draw their own patterns in there too, which tessellate on the projected walls like the original historical decorations. There are also large, “social” touch-screen tables—think of giant iPads—that let people alone or in groups sort through and look at objects in the collection. These have special search and manipulation features: Someone can draw a shape on the table and see what items in the collection fit it. And the pen—the jewel of the museum’s collection-based interactives—will function as a pen on these touch surfaces. The pen is the exact kind of object that the museum hopes to deploy in the mansion, as it augments a smartphone without requiring one.

All three of these tools—the pen, the touch-screen tables, and the immersion room— were designed and manufactured by outside firms like DSR and Local Projects. But they were created in collaboration with the Labs team, and—more importantly—they used an infrastructure developed by the team. It is the infrastructure that lets the museum plan for the near future, that lets it bridge digital and physical, that lets it Put Things on the Internet: the API. API stands for “application programming interface.” When combined with a network protocol like HTTP, an API lets computers talk to each other. Often, that talking looks like fetching information from an online database in a repeatable, organized way. Many big websites have APIs, because they let the website play nicely with the rest of the web: Twitter, for instance, has one that allows you to ask, for example, for a user’s 10 mostrecent tweets or for all the tweets tagged in a certain geographic region. Flickr’s old API, which permitted far more, was considered so special that fans asked it be considered a National Historic Landmark.

The most powerful, most important thing that Cooper Hewitt Labs has done for the museum is build one of these. No wonder it's being called “the API at the center of the museum.” The Cooper Hewitt’s API connects to the museum’s two operational databases—its vast collections database and its complex customer and ticketing databases—and fuses them. Then it makes the collections part public and accessible.

What the API means, for someone who will never visit the museum, is that every object, every designer, every nation, every era, even every color has a stable URL on the Internet. No other museum does this with the same seriousness as the Cooper Hewitt. If you want to talk about Van Gogh’s Starry Night online, you have to link to the Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is the best permanent identifier ofStarry Night-ness on the

web. But if you want to talk about an Eames Chair, you can link to the Cooper Hewitt’s page for it.

Cope explained the importance of these permanent links.

“If you and I have something we can share, then that starts to give that object weight and mass in the universe. It starts to exist,” he said. In other words, these shareable and permanent URLs start to stand in for the locked-away object.

“It’s a proxy for sure,” Cope said, “but because we can’t let you run through the actual warehouse, the choice is nothing or something. And we choose something.”

“What 'digital' in the museum means is really that everything is available whenever you want. Wherever you want, whenever, however,” said Chan. Then he asked himself the follow-up question: “How does that play out in the museum, physically? How does that begin to change the exhibitions and the ability of the exhibitions to do just different sorts of things and different ways of presenting the collection?”

For his team, it’s meant teaming up with design firms to build the pen and the immersion room. The API’s fusion of collections and visitors is what lets the pen function. The API lets users look at their favorite objects after they leave the museum. It lets users link to those objects on Facebook and talk about them.

The museum’s stack, with its two databases at the bottom and the pen at the top (Cooper Hewitt)

The museum has built itself what programmers call a stack. At the bottom are two big, proprietary servers: the database that knows about the collection and the database that knows about the visitors. In the middle is the API. On top of the API is the website, where visitors can learn about the collection and buy tickets. (It’s the website, therefore, that transfigures users into visitors.) And at the very top are the gallery interactives and the pen.

Notice the trick the Labs team has completed. The API seems to be first for users and developers. It lets them play around with the collection, see what’s there. As Cope told me, “the API is there to develop multiple interfaces. That’s the whole point of an API— you let go of control around how people interpret data and give them what they ask for, and then have the confidence they’ll find a way to organize it that makes sense for them.” But who is doing the most work around the collection—the most organizing, the most-sensemaking? It’s the museum itself.

“When we re-open, the building will be the single largest consumer of the API,” said Chan.

In other words, the museum made a piece of infrastructure for the public. But the museum will benefit in the long term, because the infrastructure will permit them to plan for the near future.

And the museum will also be, of course, the single largest beneficiary of outsider improvements to the API. It already talks to other APIs on the web. Ray Eames’s page, for instance, encourages users to tag their Instagrams and Flickr photos with a certain code. When they do, Cooper Hewitt’s API will automatically sniff it out and link that image back to its own person file for Eames. Thus, the Cooper Hewitt’s online presence grows even richer.

The Cooper Hewitt isn’t the only museum in the world with an API. The Powerhouse has one, and many art museums have uploaded high-quality images of their collections. But the power of the Cooper Hewitt’s digital interface is unprecedented. There’s a command that asks for colors as defined by the Crayola crayon palette. Another asks if the snack bar is open. A third mimics the speech of one of the Labs members. It’s a fun piece of software, and it makes a point about the scope of the museum’s vision. If design is in everything, the API says, then the museum’s collection includes every facet of the museum itself.

***

The museum’s social tablet tables (Matt Flynn/Cooper Hewitt)

Why can the Cooper Hewitt build something like this? It comes down to money.

Most museums—or arts groups, or public institutions—work on the grant model: Organizations apply for a large sum of money to be spent over a finite period of time.

For example, a museum team might get 18 months to spend $500,000 on a big, one-off exhibit about Monet. In-house curators hire external developers and a design firm, both often discounting their time as pro bono work. The outside developers make a fancy Flash app about why Monet’s brush stroke is different, and the designers produce elegant signage to teach visitors about just what they’re seeing in the museum’s halls.

Then the money is spent, and the famous design firms leave.

But this guess-and-fund model doesn’t always work. If contractor code breaks, there’s no money left over to fix it. Consider that the grant model is not only how many big exhibits get funded, but also similar to how Healthcare.gov was funded: “Expert” consultants got the specs, deployed a broken site, and departed.

“We banked on being able to outspend consumer technology by just this much,” Cope says. “So what we do is we raise a huge amount of money, and we go and we buy some very, very fancy ooo-shiny, and we put it in the galleries and amortize the cost over three or four years, and that gets people in the door, and then we do it again.”

“The museum I was at before this was a science museum, and in 1988, it launched with the most interactive experiences of any museum in the world… in 1988,” said Chan.

“Well, before I got there, most of those had stopped working.”

The museum’s marvelous tiny staircases (Robinson Meyer/The Atlantic)

Even if things do work, the model turns museum websites into museums themselves, catalogs of once-snazzy apps built for special occasions before being discarded forever.

Exhibits go away, but those apps never do. A museum’s website—the primary face of the museum to the world—winds up looking like a closet of old prom dresses.

When Bill Moggridge became the Cooper Hewitt’s director in 2010, he wanted the museum to make its digital infrastructure more thoughtfully. Moggridge, it should be noted, is a legend. He helped design the first laptop computer. He founded the worldfamous firm IDEO. And he invented the term “interaction design.” Moggridge died in 2012, not living to see the renovation project he began.

It’s a view where imperfect speech can always—and will always, and should always—be augmented by further speech.

Moggridge created Chan’s position and hired him for it. And while Chan could have kept outsourcing projects to big outside firms, he instead lobbied for funding and hire a staff.

The museum’s digital work was too important. It had to have in-house experts. “There's a lovely phrase we use a lot,” Cope said. “The guy who invented the Perl programming language talked about Perl as being there to make easy things simple and hard things possible.”

“That’s how we try to think about this. Not everyone’s gonna understand what we’ve built or the potential of what we’ve built right away. It’s gonna take some of the curators longer than others to figure it out. But the minute they get it, they should be able to turn around and be like, 'What if…? Can we do…?'—and if it’s easy, it should be live in 15 minutes.”

“It’s capacity-building for people to imagine new things, beyond a book, beyond what they thought possible,” said Chan. “For people to go, Wow, I’ve always wanted to do an exhibition about this and now it’s possible to do that.” ***

Robinson Meyer/The Atlantic

The team has accomplished so much largely by accepting imperfection. When the Labs launched the API, it was missing a lot of information. Cope called the quality of its metadata at launch “incredibly spotty,” before Chan clarified, “it’s terrible.”

But that was on purpose. Better to put the museum’s grand imperfection and incompleteness out in the world and let people make of it what they will, the team decided, then wait for it to be perfect. “It was a tactical play to say, don’t obsess about that stuff, because its what people do with it that matters,” said Chan.

“We could spend the next 50 years trying to make that data perfect and it still would not ever be perfect. There was 70 years of collecting that had different documenting standards. Museums only started collecting policies in the eighties and nineties. How can you retrospectively fix everything? It just can’t be done. So let’s move on and figure out what we want to do with it,” he said.

This attitude—popularized by Steve Jobs with the phrase, “Real artists ship”—extends to how the team thinks through media production, too. “I can’t sit on a video for six months, making these minute edits. I have to pitch it out door, so we can say: This interview got this many views, this thing got this many views, let’s keep going with this,” said Shelly.

The Labs’s work, as a whole, is an investment in a particular idea of cultural democracy.

It’s a view where imperfect speech can always—and will always, and should always—be augmented by further speech. It trusts in the discourse over the perfection of the original work.

And that piecemeal vision of how culture should work is borne out by how the museum actually came together. The Cooper Hewitt is an institution agglomerated. The Hewitt sisters assembled their collection of designs and patterns as an educational resource.

Like their grandfather, Peter Cooper—father of the Cooper Union, which was until recently one of the last free undergraduate art schools in the country—they hoped to tame the rugged American craftsman by exposing him to the Continent’s fine decorative arts. And the collection only resides in the Carnegie Mansion now because both it and the Hewitt collection happened to enter the Smithsonian’s stewardship at the same time—and both were already in Manhattan.

A screenshot from Planetary, the first app the Labs team collected (Cooper Hewitt)

Maybe that’s why, when the Labs team collected its first app, it open-sourced it.Planetary is an iPad app that let users explore their music collection like it was a galaxy of celestial orbs, with stars as artists, planets as albums, and moons as songs.

Thanks to iOS updates, it hasn’t worked perfectly for a couple years.

“We didn’t want to make the first thing we collected different from everything else except it was a different medium. It was: No, this is fundamentally different, because you have access to it,” Chan told me. “The ability to see how a thing’s changed through its development process is something that is potentially unique in that regard.”

And that open-source code has begun to restore the old purpose of the Cooper Hewitt: a kind of teaching database of physical objects. Writing about the museum in the early 20th century, Eleanor Hewitt made it clear that her main goal was not to save the objects in the collection, but the information within them: Naturally constant use will have a tendency to damage, even destroy certain objects (many of course, are indestructible), but irreparable damage could not be accomplished under a hundred years, and if in that time an artistic tradition passed on from father to son, as in Europe has been created, the existence or non-existence of these objects will

not seriously matter, and during all that time the Museum will have been fulfilling its destiny.

From the beginning, then, the Cooper Hewitt has prized information over object, discourse over perfection. And while it can no longer permit artists to destroy the physical objects it holds by copying them—the Smithsonian’s central job is preservation—it can allow them to mess with the digital versions. Hence the API, hence the stable URLs, hence the open source code.

And perhaps already, the Labs team believes, that digital information will be inextricable from the physical object. The Cooper Hewitt has long collected napkin sketches of famous logos and inventions. If it wants to collect the rough thoughts of today, it will have to work fast, because napkins last longer in files than sketch files do on iPads.

“To collect a Nest absent of any data, what does that tell you?,” asked Cope.“It tells you it’s a beautiful piece of industrial design. Well, maybe the museum should start thinking about some way of keeping that data alongside the object, and maybe it doesn’t need to be privileged in the way the object is.”

In the past few years, technologists have mourned the “web we lost.” Most websites used to have open APIs: Now, the gardens of user content on which the modern web was founded have been walled away. What the Cooper Hewitt suggests is that public institutions might take up this mantle, making their considerable extant collections public and beginning to preserve new ones. The Library of Congress already holds the Twitter archive. In two decades, that collection—a remarkable reserve of American speech circa the 2010s—could look like a souped-up version of the contemporary Cooper Hewitt.

But the team’s aspirations are, for now, more commonplace. As I was leaving, Cope recounted how, early on, a curator had asked him why the collections website and API existed. Why are you doing this?

His retrospective answer wasn’t about scholarship or data-mining or huge interactive exhibits. It was about the web.

“I want people to link to this,” he said. “We’re the national design museum. Ninety percent of the essays that are written online about the Eames chair or whatever link to Wikipedia, and good for them, they earned it. But people should link to us, because

we’re the Smithsonian. We should be that good. When it comes to social stuff, if we can provide that stability, if all it is is just people linking to us, to me, that’s enough.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/how-to-build-the-museum-of-thefuture/384646/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Famed-Illustrator-Maira-Kalman-Takes-on-the-Cooper-HewittsCollections-180952440/#L1ZxSaSDRzTjKcqK.99