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National Design Triennial

Cooper-Hewitt invites you to submit ideas for our fourth Triennial exhibition, opening in 2010. We are looking for designers, firms, and projects from around the world that answer the question “Why design now?” Why is design an essential tool for solving some of today’s most urgent problems? What draws creative thinkers, makers, and problem solvers to this crucial field of discovery? Why should business leaders, policy makers, consumers, and citizens embrace design values?

Today’s designers are addressing human and environmental problems with renewed vigor. This social turn is the single most important trend connecting the many fields of contemporary design practice, from architecture and products to fashion, graphics, new media, and landscapes. Designers are confronting issues of sustainability, accessibility, universality, fair trade, conservation, health, education, creative capitalism, and underserved audiences. They are creating systems, services, and social networks as well as physical products that seek to communicate, innovate, and inform. These designers are enhancing human experience by inventing solutions that are as beautiful as they are just.

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will launch its first global design Triennial, the fourth in a series of ambitious exhibitions surveying key developments across the design disciplines. Please share your nominations with the exhibition’s curators, Cara McCarty, Matilda McQuaid, Cynthia E. Smith, and Ellen Lupton, who are looking for the best ideas coming from around the world.

Submit your ideas for our fourth Triennial exhibition here.

Design Life Now in Boston

  • By: Ellen Lupton
  • | Monday September 3, 2007
  • | 1 Comment(s)

On September 28, Design Life Now will open at the Boston Institute of Comtemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, where it will be on view through January 6. The installation is being designed by Michael Meredith, who is featured in the exhibition. Hear Michael talk about his work on our Triennial podcast.

For those of us who saw the Triennial in New York, it will be exciting to see it installed in the wonderful new ICA building, designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro. If you never got to see the exhibition, here’s a great opportunity.

Design Education for Everyone

An amazing group of teachers just spent the week at Cooper-Hewitt, participating in our on-going City of Neighborhoods program for educators. This year, the museum invited around forty teachers from New Orleans to take part in a week-long study of how design can work in the classroom, with a focus on exploring one’s local community. (This team did their work in Chinatown, a neighborhood recovering, like New Orleans, from disaster.)

What better way to share design thinking than through teachers and classrooms? Our guests from New Orleans represent all subject areas—not just art but science, social studies, language arts, and more. The museum’s goal in bringing design education to schools is not to recruit young people to become professional designers (although some of our other programs are geared that way), but rather to help them use design in all aspects of thinking and living.

See how you or your community could be using design in the classroom at Cooper-Hewitt’s Educator Resource Center. Now that’s a democratic view of design.

Graphic Design as Consumer Product

  • By: Ellen Lupton
  • | Thursday August 16, 2007
  • | 1 Comment(s)

One of the themes looked at in the Triennial is the rise of graphic design as a consumer product. It used to be that graphic design was strictly a business-to-business service. Now, everyday citizens have access to professional quality software, fonts, printing services, and more. It’s a whole new world out there.

One example of this is Blik, whose precut vinyl graphics can applied to walls or windows in any home or office. Available at Target, Urban Outfitters, and other retailers, Blik’s products have converted a professional service (custom-cut vinyl graphics) into a direct-to-consumer commodity.

If you want to design your own vinyl graphics, create a vector-based image file in a program such as Illustrator or Corel Draw, and take it to a sign company. (Focus on flat, single-color designs, such as lettering, ions, and silhouettes.) Most urban areas in the US have dozens of fast-service sign companies geared to the needs of small businesses. For ideas, visit Blik.

It's a Book, It's a Blog, Too

Here’s another blog that just became a book: Michael Bierut’s new collection of essays, Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, published by Princeton Architectural Press. Sixty-eight of those essays first appeared on Design Observer, the blog that Bierut edits with Wiliam Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, and contributors.

Bierut has started a conversation at Design Observer about why someone might want to possess a book of essays whose content is largely available for free on the Internet.

I see a couple of reasons.

First, the book gives us all Bierut, all the time. It pulls together his singular voice, allowing us to listen to it as a whole. Likewise, although I read the New Yorker most weeks, I would still be interested in seeing essays gathered over time by some of its best contributors. (I can find the essays for free on-line, although the New Yorker may not know that.)

Second, the book is permanent. In twenty years, this book will remain a snapshot of a particular moment in history. And since it is written by Michael Bierut, it will be a funny and candid snapshot that will make anyone still alive then laugh.

Third, every essay in the book is set in a different typeface, and it’s still not possible to do that on a blog.