Austria

The News 06.23.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Sometimes it seems like there really is a museum for and about everything. Name a topic, and I bet you can find an obscure museum dedicated to it. Tractors? Barbed wire? Plastics? Architectural models? Chinese shadow puppets? Battlestar Galactica? | Natural history exhibits opening this summer, in no way exhaustive: Whales at the Museum of Science, Boston (they offer a museum admission/whale watch ticket combo); The Deep at the Natural History Museum, London; Race to the End of the Earth, about Arctic explorers, at the American Museum of Natural History; the AMNH’s Climate Change exhibit moves to the Field Museum in Chicago; Age of Mammals, a “a postmodern diorama” in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles’s newly restored 1912 building | This photo of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s collection of thousands of birds is just great | A Micro Museum for the Design of and with Typography; Typopassage Vienna is inside the Museumsquartier in Vienna and open 24 hours a day, every week of the year. (Curious; who’d be there at 4am?) | Shape Lab, an interactive educational space for families. Who wouldn’t want to play there? | The British Museum and Wikipedia’s unusual collaboration.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed or replaced. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 23 June 2010.

The News 03.17.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Today, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History opened its 15,000 square-foot Hall of Human Origins (original link no longer available). It looks nice. Lots of skulls | March is Women in History Month; to celebrate, the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum has a four-part online exhibition Women on Stamps | A behind-the-scenes video of The First Ladies at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History | The MoMA’s changing wall colors, from their blog (link no longer available) | An interactive matrix of green design strategies | Congratulations to Bisphenol A (BPA) — found in my friend vinyl — for its win at The Toxies in the category “Worst Breakthrough Performance and Viewer’s Choice Award for Worst Chemical of 2009” | Kinetic sculptures are awesome: Magic Wave by Reuben Margolin, and the BMW Museum’s kinetic sculpture | “Moomin Valley,” designed for a family entertainment center, is adorable and clever | I love, love, love, Tara Donovan. If you’re anywhere near Indianapolis between April 4 and August 1, you need to see her show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art | Tomás Saraceno (link added in 2021; very cool website) collaborated with astrophysicists, architects, engineers and arachnologists (spider researchers!) for this interactive art installation based on “the imagery and structure of spider webs to map the origin and structure of the universe” | Bruno Maag’s typographic exhibition Shape My Language in which “long streams of clear plastic cards hang from the ceiling, engulfing the gallery visitors in a typographic mist.”

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken link has been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 17 March 2010.