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| Mar 4, 2013 |
MoMA exhibit focuses on the vitality and diversity of design
By Staff

The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) new exhibition, Applied Design, showcases new directions of contemporary design including 100 examples of interface and interaction design, dynamic visualizations, products, furniture, 3D printed chairs and bowls, emergency equipment, and bio-design.

The exhibition is organized by Paola Antonelli, senior curator, and Kate Carmody, curatorial assistant of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, and will be installed in the MoMA’s Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries tomorrow through January 31, 2014.

The objects on display range from a mine detonator by the young Dutch/Afghani designer Massoud Hassani to a bowl made by transforming desert sand into glass using only the energy of the sun. Also on display are the first 14 video games to enter MoMA’s collection as part of ongoing research on interaction design.

Here are some highlights from the exhibition:

Hassani’s dandelion-shaped mine detonator is equipped with a GPS to record a safe path and designed to roll through mine fields. If the object, made from bamboo and biodegradable plastics, encounters a mine and detonates it, it will only partially destruct and can be salvaged and reassembled into a new specimen ready for deployment. Hassani grew up in the war-torn countryside of Afghanistan, where many of his friends were injured or killed by landmines. He drew on this personal experience to design a universal and low-cost tool that can save many lives.  

The Earthquake Proof Table by Ido Bruno and Arthur Brutter—Brutter’s final project while a student in the Industrial Design program at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem—is inexpensive, lightweight, and can provide shelter and protection during earthquakes by absorbing the impact of falling debris.

Markus Kayser’s Solar-sintered bowl was made using desert sand and the sun. The process of converting a powder into a solid by heating is known as sintering, and it is central in 3D printing, a process by which computer-controlled machines deposit or solidify liquid or powdered resin layer by layer, to create a three-dimensional rendering of a digital design. Kayser applied this technology, which is closely identified with computers, robotics and resins, to natural resources. He tested his first manually operated solar 3D printing machine in 2011 in the Moroccan desert, using silica sand, which turns to glass after heating and cooling. He completed a bigger, fully automated computer-driven version called SolarSinter later that year and tested it in the Sahara. The bowl in the exhibition was produced by the SolarSinter and will have an accompanying video that documents the process.

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

The criteria used to select the 14 video games emphasized not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects, from the elegance of the code to the design of the payer’s behavior. Interactive games such as Passage, Tetris, Pac-Man, Katamari Damacy, vib-ribbon, Cannabalt, flOw, Portal and Another World are playable using controllers, while games such as Eve Online, Dwarf Fortress, SimCity2000, The Sims and Myst are presented as walkthroughs or demos. Headphones will be provided for games that have sound and an ongoing game soundtrack that features the sounds of one game at a time will be audible in the galleries.

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