Design and the Elastic Mind

Wim Van de Velde points us to a Museum of Modern Art online exhibit, which augments a gallery exhibition: Design and the Elastic Mind. Some very interesting design and visualization displays, three hundred in total, includes science and what I would call 'pure' art and design. There is also a 'random' navigation tool that can surprise you. Each item deserves some study, and they do a good job of linking to background information. Some I have seen, many not. Inspirational at least. It's done spectacularly in Flash, which is impressive, but as a result is not as findable as it could be.

" ... Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration.

Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.  ... "