My “temporary” hiatus went longer than expected. That perfect “bam! I’m back!” post topic never appeared. I was quiet too long, and this blog situation got to be rather awkward.

Let’s forget about all that and pick up where we left off, shall we? I have a backlog of exhibit design goodness to share with you. Yes that’s right…bam! I’m back!

In the meantime, if you’re in the New England area please join AIGA Boston at the Best of New England (BoNE) Show in Boston on June 9. Tickets available here.

Behind the scenes
+ Creating Material Lab at MoMA
+ Design to Preserve at Cooper-Hewitt

Coming soon…?
+ On the Mall 1: National Women’s History Museum
+ And 2: Proposed Smithsonian Latino Museum Faces Hurdles
+ “Jurassic Park meets Buckminster Fuller”—a zoo that imagines a reunited Pangea
+ MoMath, the Museum of Math in New York, raising funds

In the meantime
+ Vertical Urban Factory at the Skyscraper Museum in New York (slide show here) and Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
+ The World’s Largest Dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History looks amazing; slide show (I love photo 3!)
+ La Plaza de Cultura y Artes Mexican American cultural center in LA, “screens in a public alley space that both bring the stories out of the museum and draw passersby into the experience.” More in this article from GOOD

Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day)
+ The National Museum of American Jewish History opens in Philadelphia
+ Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center; review and slide show
+ The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles: review and slide show

One for the road…
+ The T steps up its “See Something Say Something” campaign. The package in North Station:

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At MoMA through June 6 is the exhibition Looking at Music 3.0. It explores music’s influence on contemporary art (and vice versa) during the 80s and 90s in NY. Dim lighting, gaudy neon walls, and early music videos blasting on the large screen in the middle of the gallery: it’s almost as though you’ve returned to the time of boom boxes and mix tapes. Social and political issues are mentioned briefly in the exhibit copy—but there are many topics touched upon in this relatively small space, so don’t expect a thorough history lesson. Art and music are loosely grouped by topics such as ‘early hip hop’ but, fittingly, neither chronology nor subject dictate the layout of the exhibition in an obvious way.

Above, a place to sit and watch the music videos. There were only a few in the loop, to discourage lingering I’d imagine. What they may not have realized is that people would stay quite awhile to watch Grace Jones. Also, listening stations throughout the exhibition (below, left) and an interactive media installation by Perry Holberman (right)…

You can read more about the process of creating the exhibit in this Listening to Art blog post.

Bonus pics below of the entrance to Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914, an exhibition of 70 collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and photographs. On view through June 6 and definitely worth seeing.

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I was honored to be involved with the Say Something Poster Project (mentioned previously, here), lending my exhibit design services to Saturday’s Poster Show.

This was a case of less being much more. Initially I started with grand ideas to incorporate elements from the website branding into the three-dimensional exhibit space, but gradually the exhibit was whittled down to its essence, to give the 25 poster finalists all the attention—and to make the one-day installation manageable.

Below is Matt Budelman, designer of “Think Half Full,” one of the ten winning posters. He’s making a cameo to show the system I settled on—posters hanging on 1.25″ bulldog clips held to the wall with L pins, and labels mounted to black illustration board and attached top and bottom with L pins. Because I’m quite particular, you bet all the edges on those labels were hit with a deft stroke of gray marker.

Other things I helped with: “the poster show” script title on the back was drawn by illustrator Chris Piascik. I simply made it large and put it on the wall in contour-cut vinyl. Working with organizer Jason Stevens, I designed the ballots that guests used to vote for ten top posters out of the 25 finalists.

It was a great concept and a fantastic event—all to benefit The Home for Little Wanderers. Kudos to all the finalists and winners, the volunteers, and to Jason!

The super talented photographer Ben Gebo shot these photos from the event, and more.

Ben was also, incidentally, the photographer for the event I organized for Friday night, the AIGA BoNE Show’s “Meet the Judges” event. Check them out.

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Restoring and Recreating
+ Renovating the Barnum Museum in CT after it was hit by a tornado
+ The winner of the PaleoArt Prize in 3D art for “achievement in…depicting or sculpting paleontological subjects and fossils”
+ China asks the Penn Museum to return all artifacts from its Silk Road exhibition.

Architecture and such
+ On scalies.
+ The just-announced winners of this year’s MoMA P.S. 1 Young Architects program asked local businesses and nonprofits what materials they needed, then designed the courtyard space to use them. In the fall they’ll donate said materials to said businesses.

Visiting exhibitions vicariously through the internets
+ Tattooed arms in Paris
+ Dismembered dandies in Sweden

Visiting exhibitions for real
+ South African printmaking at BU’s 808 Gallery

Or at least planning to (Boston)…
+ Edward Gorey at the Boston Athenæum
+ Tangible Things at Harvard
+ Also, the Planetarium—it’s open!

Or at least planning to (NY)…
+ The Museum of Arts and Design’s new Center for Olfactory Art
+ http://www.cityreliquary.org/
+ The reopening of the American Museum of the Moving Image in January—the inaugural events continue

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This Friday February 4 I’ll be in Providence for the AIGA Rhode Island event 20|11 reflect | respond | resolve | DESIGN—local creatives speaking their minds for 60 seconds each. I imagine that in those 60 seconds I will have time to stand up, introduce myself, thank the chapter for inviting me to participate and with what time is left, ask if there are any questions. Actually, I’m going to talk about the theme of this year’s AIGA Best of New England (BoNE) Show, “Wicked Problems. Wicked Solutions.”

Friday also happens to be the BoNE Show regular deadline, so New England designers: enter your work now. (Or aim for the February 11 late deadline.) The competition accepts all visual design work—including environmental design.

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First, there were the tours. Options included a tour of Boston’s boutique hotels, tours of the MIT Media Lab, and a tour of the new Art of the Americas wing at the MFA Boston. I didn’t go on any of these. A few of my coworkers got the behind-the-scenes sneak peak of the MFA (read Katelyn’s description); I instead attended a symposium called Cultural Catalysts to Inclusive/ Socially Sustainable Design. The MFA did feature in my conference experience later when it was discussed at length during another symposium I attended, Museums in the Digital Age. I also stopped by the PechaKucha, and—to round out my conference experience with some practical knowledge—I went to the workshop, Sustainability in Environmental Graphic Design. Click through for my recaps of each.

*Apologies for the tardy post. Time these days…somehow seems to just slip away from me. I think maybe because I am entirely wrapped up in organizing the AIGA BoNE Show but who can say for certain. :[  

PechaKucha

PechaKucha Nights are events for designers to meet, network, and show their work. Presenters are given 20 seconds to show each of 20 images. The slides automatically advance after 20 seconds, forcing presenters to stay on topic and talk fast. Usually presentations are really interesting. If one’s not…well, it’s over in 400 seconds.

Highlights:

• Artforming showed examples of their site-specific public art and architecture installations. Their work centers around environment, emerging technologies, and the synthesis of art and science.

• Two Northeastern University students shared their experiences with Freedom by Design. Freedom by Design is the AIAS (American Institute of Architecture Students)’s community service program that teaches students how to resolve accessibility issues in the homes of low-income people with disabilities. The students work to “radically impact the lives of people in their community through modest design and construction solutions.” The program is looking for supporters and mentors if you’d like to get involved.

• Saeed Arida and Saba Ghole explained the studio environment of NuVu in Kendall Square, Cambridge. NuVu is “a place of innovation where middle and high school students join together with experts from MIT and Harvard to create new views of the world.” It sounded like an incredible program. If I could go back to high school…sign me up, please?!

Cultural Catalysts to Inclusive/Socially Sustainable Design

This symposium was sponsored by the Institute for Human Centered Design, an international education and design non-profit based in Boston that is “dedicated to enhancing the experience of people of all ages and abilities through excellence in design.” The symposium was moderated by Valerie Fletcher, the Institute’s executive director.

• Dr. Shigeki Inoue spoke first. He is executive manager at Hakuhodo Universal Design, a consulting and creative boutique in Tokyo that seeks to improve the lives and satisfaction of sei-katsu-sha (“living persons”) of differing needs and abilities. Dr. Inoue is researching “science in design” to create a method of design that reaches and includes the greatest number of people. His research focuses on print media; specifically, creating a highly legible Japanese typeface. Dr. Inoue asked the question, “why do designers make designs that are difficult to read?” and spoke to how graphic design remains largely inaccessible for people who have low vision.

His presentation made me wonder: graphic designers, if you can create a design that is more legible for more people—by increasing the text size, by using a different typeface, by increasing contrast between the background and text color—why wouldn’t you? Is it that you think it is readable or that you don’t realize that it’s not? Do you not care? The balance of aesthetic and accessibility is something that all graphic designers should aim for, not just those creating with museum environments.

• Karin Bendixen is director of the consultancy Bexcom and founder and president of the Danish Design for All network. She writes about “Design for All” concepts, targeting architects, planners, designers, and politicians. She asked that we change our mindsets from designing for disabled individuals as a distinct segment of society to designing for society as though everyone has a disability (everything is accessible for everyone); and from “what design is” to “what design can do.” Bendixen encouraged us all to be better at promoting the messages of Universal Design: holistic design, sustainability, and design for all.

• Rachna Khare is Professor and Doctoral Research Coordinator at the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal, India. She lectures and writes about universal design in India. There are 70 million people with disabilities in India (5–6% of the population), and the majority live in rural areas. Most of the current accessibility efforts in India are “too Western” in their approach, according to Khare. Her goal is to make universal design an entrenched part of Indian culture.

• The symposium was wrapped up by Jason Schupbach, the new design director for the National Endowment for the Arts’s Visual Arts Division. The NEA is an independent government agency that funds arts in the United States: performances, exhibitions, festivals, artist residencies, and other projects in different disciplines and fields from arts education to the visual arts, in all fifty states and in rural and inner city areas and military bases. The NEA had a budget of $167.5 million for fiscal year 2010, making it the largest national funder of the arts, and according to its website, its grants “have a powerful multiplying effect, with each grant dollar typically generating up to seven times more in matching resources.” The National Endowment for the Arts is also a partner in Blue Star Museums, the program that offers free museum admission to military personnel and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

Schupbach talked about some of the NEA’s goals and initiatives. He first spoke about the NEA’s focus on communities and “creative placemaking,” and on investment in planning, design, and arts engagement; he then talked about the NEA’s funding activities across design disciplines. The NEA is currently collecting datasets from all design disciplines, and is interested in strategic investment in design and connecting designers with those businesses and federal organizations that are interested in design thinking. There are many funding opportunities in design and—little-known fact?—non-profit organizations that are 3+ years old can apply for grants to hire designers.

Museums in the Digital Age

Moderated by Aisha Densmore-Bey of the BSA’s Museum and Exhibit Design Committee, this symposium featured Susan Leidy, Deputy Director of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH; Peter Kuttner, President of Cambridge Seven Associates in Cambridge, MA; and Ann Beha of Ann Beha Architects in Boston, MA. The symposium description: “…even as daily life is reconfigured constantly by technology, museums retain their esteem as bastions of culture. In the face of an increasingly interactive world online, is a physical space still necessary to experience art?”

• Susan Leidy’s talk focused on these questions: What are museums currently thinking about and doing with media? Where does media fit in? Does original artwork still matter? According to her, media and technology should only be used to further museums’ missions and museums should take care to stay true to those missions, whatever they might be—education, conservation, collecting, or something else. Original artwork does still matter. (And projecting this onto other types of museums; historical documents, artifacts, live animals, sight, sound, smell, touch…still matters.) The Currier Museum attempts to provide stimulating encounters with artwork. More than anything else, visitors want authenticity in a museum experience. They go to see real physical objects. Take home message: compromise authenticity for digital media at our peril.

• Peter Kuttner drew connections between two very different seeming types of museum/themed experiences: the art museum and the zoo. Both are, again, primarily about authenticity and seeing the real thing. The tendency in these types of environments is to separate the media from the art/animals so as not to detract from the art/animals. Kuttner gave a few case studies of projects by C7 Associates to illustrate what media can do when used thoughtfully in an exhibit. Media technology allows you to quickly respond to current events if there’s a reason to do so. It’s also possible to “hide” the technology by integrating it into the experience of the exhibit space (or, to put it another way: allow technology to inform but not dominate a space). Technology can encourage group activity and indepth learning, but has to be taken to a level beyond sitting at a monitor.

• Ann Beha spoke at length about the Museum of Fine Arts’s new Art of the Americas wing. (A project, she pointed out, that she did not work on but admires.) One of the MFA’s media highlights is its new website, which features a homepage that continually updates and changes as it rotates through photos of its exhibitions, and introduces “Buzz,” their foray into social media. Buzz brings together the MFA’s Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and Facebook accounts and is an intentional attempt to engage in a dialogue with its visitors and gather real time feedback on people’s experiences at the museum. Ann mentioned that the MFA was the first museum to post its entire collection online, in 1995, and has in many ways been an internet leader in the museum industry.

Ann stated, “You have to explore all types of media to be effective” and strive for meaningfulness in the ways you use technology. All technology within the MFA helps to support the museum’s missions of collecting, stewardship, scholarship, engagement, enlightenment. There are study stations incorporated into the wayfinding in the corridors; easy-to-use multimedia guides that provide many options for self-directed learning; touch screen stations that teach and engage visitors on a deeper level than provided by the exhibition labeling alone; touch tables. Everything is integrated into the environment of the museum in a seamless way with “intense design sensibilities.” The physical architecture of the museum building becomes a blank canvas for media, and an opportunity to create public spaces that are full of life and possibilities.

Sustainability in Environmental Graphic Design

Discussed were some strategies for EGD sustainability including material selection, resource and waste management, energy and lighting efficiency, air and water quality, public education, and costs. I’ve been working on a list of websites and blogs that focus on sustainability, and you can explore them in this website’s sidebar to the right.

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and plenty of whiz bang.

Below, a touch screen to explore Ben Franklin’s book Experiments and Observations on Electricity…

and the “Electrical Signals” wall; use your phone and it responds with flashing LEDs…

group interactives…experiments…

and a “sustainable dance floor.”

A lot of fun. That about covers it. The exhibit is ongoing.

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WICKED PROBLEMS. WICKED SOLUTIONS. We’re not talking about witches or nor’easters: we’re talking about design. The BoNE Show recognizes the best of New England’s wicked problem solvers. Are you one? Enter your work today at www.boneshow.org.

The AIGA Best of New England (BoNE) Show is a biennial design competition open to all designers in in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont; any design project published between January 2009 and January 2011 is eligible for entry.

Deadline for Entries: February 4, 2011
Late Deadline: February 11, 2011

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The deadline is fast approaching, so designers: hop to it and enter your best work today. It would be great to see more exhibition work entered this year—exhibit designers represent! (Not that I have any say in the outcome. The doling out of awards will be entirely up to these fine folk.)

Good luck!

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