The News 05.01.11

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Creating Material Lab at MoMA | Design to Preserve by the Cooper-Hewitt | Coming soon to the Mall? National Women’s History Museum Makes Another Push Toward Existence and National Latino Museum Plan Faces Fight (hint: probably not) | “Jurassic Park meets Buckminster Fuller” — a zoo that imagines a reunited Pangea | MoMath, the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, is raising funds | Vertical Urban Factory at the Skyscraper Museum in New York (slide show here) | 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 here; 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 | The National Museum of American Jewish History opens in Philadelphia | Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opens in Skokie (review and slide show) | The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles (review and slide show) | The MBTA steps up its “See Something Say Something” campaign, and in Boston’s North Station:

AND an upcoming opening!

Conner Prairie Interactive History Park is opening a new exhibit, 1863 Civil War Journey: Raid on Indiana, in June. Part theater, part living history museum; the interactive experience is centered around a recreation of a Civil War-era town complete with homes, a general store, and a schoolhouse. As part of the Christopher Chadbourne & Associates team, I designed the graphics located in the schoolhouse, where the lessons of the park are pulled together.

I designed a tabletop graphic for a touch table that houses three monitors. It’s meant to appear as though it were strewn with historic maps and military tactical manuals. I also designed a flipbook that holds background information about the park’s characters, in the style of a scrapbook; and a large “chalkboard” wall graphic inspired by Civil War broadsides and illustrated with a map and hand lettering. These were fun graphics to design, geared toward families and school groups.

Post updated in January 2021. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 1 May 2011.

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.

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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 01.26.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum announced that it has broken ground on a new 70,000 sq ft wing designed by Renzo Piano. I think the expanded space is much needed and it should be beautiful. But what about that whole “the museum has to stay As-Is for perpetuity” thing? Further reading: write-ups from the New York Times and the Boston Globe | Why do we go to museums?, from the Walker Art Center, includes a list of visitors’ motivational identities and characterizations | Paola Antonelli, Architecture and Design Curator for the MoMA, talks to Johnny Holland Magazine about “her process for creating an exhibition, the future of design, and how we make people and objects more elastic” | No, everything is not going to be okay | Why [designers don't have a] place at the table | Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass MoCA; “based upon Mies van der Rohe’s uncompleted project, the House with Four Columns (1951), a square structure open to view on all four sides through glass walls. … the house was constructed at approximately half scale and inverted, the ceiling of the original becoming the sculpture’s floor, the floor becoming the ceiling, and all interior elements such as Mies-designed furniture and partition walls installed upside down” | Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future at the Museum of the City of New York; “the first retrospective of this prolific, unorthodox, and controversial 20th-century architect” | Read My Pins: The Madeline Albright Collection at the Museum of Arts and Design in NY | An interactive map of public art and notable architecture on the MIT campus, from the List Center | Trade Show History, a photo archive to spend some hours in | If your interest in New England textiles was piqued by my post about the American Textile History Museum, a short essay from Looking Backward: Why Chicago Made Doors and Boston Made Textiles | Boarded up Buckydome along with Buckminster Fuller’s Everything I Know | Urban Nature Project by Naoko Ito.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 26 January 2010.