Over the next two weeks on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Blog, students from an interdisciplinary graduate-level course on the Triennial taught by the Triennial curatorial team blog their impressions and inspirations of the current exhibition,‘Why Design Now?’.     If there is one design on view at the 2010 Triennial that affects the lives of every...

Why? Oceangoing ships present significant health, pollution, and efficiency challenges. The concept vessel E/S Orcelle is designed to be propelled without oil. Made of lightweight materials, it relies on energy sources obtained at sea—solar energy collected through photovoltaic panels in the sails, wind energy obtained through propulsion sails, and wave energy from fins, which can...

Most people go to exhibitions to look at the objects. Eggheads go to read the labels. Design geeks (and museum professionals like myself) want to study the installation itself. How are the platforms and cases constructed? How are the texts laid out? How are supplementary graphics handled? Cooper-Hewitt’s new exhibition Design for a Living World...

An energy-efficient straw bale house is being built on the Mall, across the street from the US Capitol. Natural builders from around the country converged on Washington DC to construct the straw shelter and a bamboo shade structure. Rose Morin, a green builder from New Mexico and one of the over dozen volunteers with Builders...

At the end of the introduction to the Multiple Choice exhibition, the curator reflects that, “as contemporary design industries move to open-sourcing and electronic formats for the marketing of their products, physical samples may soon become obsolete.” From a future academic and archival view point, this is a sad possibility, as material sampling formats contain...