100 Ideas That Changed Architecture

How the art and science of building evolved along the parallel axes of the philosophical and the pragmatic.

“Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously observed. Indeed, this convergence of practicality and beauty is perhaps the central defining characteristic of architecture itself, and of every meaningful development that has pushed the discipline forward over the millennia. In 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture (public library), Cardiff University architecture professor Richard Weston and British publisher Laurence King — who brought us 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, 100 Ideas That Changed Film, and the epic Saul Bass monograph — trace the most influential cornerstones of architectural ideology and practice, arranged chronologically, from the fireplace (idea #1) to the term “the everyday” (idea #100), by way of the arch (idea #10), symmetry (idea #25), utopia (idea #32), the elevator (idea #49), empathy (idea #55), “less is more” (idea #74), and sustainability (idea #95).

Weston writes in the introduction:

Surprisingly few of the ideas are philosophical or theoretical in character; indeed, some readers may wonder whether some of them — like Fireplace with which the book begins, and Wall and Brick which quickly follow — are ideas at all….

‘Ideas’ that really change the practical art of architecture are not just the relatively few grand philosophical bodies of thought that shape civilizations, but frequently altogether more humble ideas like a brick or reinforcing concrete with rods of steel. Everything that humans make begins, ultimately, with an idea: not, perhaps, those we think of as patentable — the kind cartoonists like to represent as a bulb flashing in a scientist’s head — but as a guiding concept that, for example, tells a stonemason how to shape and place stone on stone to create an arch which, as if by magic, makes it possible to defy gravity and make an opening in a wall. Many such ideas must have occurred independently to different people in different places and the moment when the metaphorical bulb first flashed will never be known — but this does not diminish their importance.

Idea # 4: COLUMN AND BEAM

Steel frames, consisting of vast networks of columns and beams, have been the preferred structure for tall buildings in the U.S. since the late nineteenth century.

Idea # 5: DOOR

'Places made for an occasion,' from Gaudi’s Casa Milà in Barcelona and Michel de Klerk’s housing in Amsterdam to medieval doors in San Gimignano, the design of openings and doors offers rich, expressive possibilities.

‘A door,’ observed the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, ‘is a place made for an occasion.’ The language is personal, but the thought universal: although necessary for security, privacy, and climatic protection, doors transcend the demands of function by mediating the moment of entering and leaving a building or room.

Idea # 11: VAULT

Right: Lincoln Cathedral is celebrated for its experimental vaults, such as that seen here in St. Hugh’s Choir –known as the “Crazy Vault” on account of its eccentric, asymmetrical version of the classic six-part tierceron vault developed in France.

Idea # 15: ATRIUM

Right: Glass-covered atria—seen here on the grand scale at Rafael Viñoly’s Tokyo International Forum—offer numerous environmental and energy-saving advantages and have become common in offices, hotels, and many other buildings since the 1980s.

Idea # 19: PROPORTION

Top left: Le Corbusier’s lifelong fascination with proportion as a key to architectural beauty culminated in the development of a proportioning system based on the so-called Golden Raio, published in his book Le Modulor in 1948.

‘Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members as in the case of those of a well shaped man.’ Thus wrote Vitruvius in his Ten Books of Architecture, restating a belief that descends from the Pythagorean tradition of mathematics and number mysticism in Greek philosophy, but began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where dimensions were derived from the symmetry and proportions of the body.

Idea # 22: IDEAL

In plan and section, Classical designs such as Sir Christopher Wren’s for St. Paul’s Cathedral, were controlled by 'ideal' geometric forms such as circles and squares that were thought to bring visual harmony to the composition.

One of the most pervasive ideas in the West is that the ultimate reality is based in the mind or ideas. In Western thought, and indeed in architecture, this has led to an attempt to represent things in an ideal form, as they ought to be rather than as they are.

Idea # 25: SYMMETRY

Left: As well as sharing the use of axial symmetry in their spatial organization, the decoration of Islamic buildings abounds in complex forms of symmetry rarely encountered in Western architecture.

Idea # 27: PARTICULARITY In philosophy, the word ‘particulars’ is used to describe concrete things existing in space and time, which stand in opposition to abstractions. The word ‘particular’ may not come to mind as readily as ideas infused with the Platonic world view — form, ideal, symmetry, proportion — but it describes recurring attitudes in architecture, from responding to the genius loci and a concern for place rather than space, to designing in the nature of materials.

[…]

Frank Lloyd Wright’s determination to design houses in response to the particular qualities of a site is seen at its most spectacular in Fallingwater (1935) where everything, from the overall ‘geological’ stratification to a concrete trellis wrapped around a tree trunk reflects this aspiration.

Idea # 28: ARCHITECT

Left: More than any of his contemporaries, Le Corbusier—seen here with his ever-present black-rimmed glasses—helped to define the modern image of the architect as an inspired artist-designer.

As its derivation from the Greek words for ‘chief’ and ‘carpenter’ suggests, the term ‘architect’ is ancient. The current idea of the architect as an independent professional knowledgeable in all aspects of design and construction, however, has more recent roots in the Renaissance and was consolidated only in the eighteenth century.

Idea # 30: PERSPECTIVE PROJECTION

Right: This beautiful watercolor rendering of the project for Otto Wagner’s own house in Vienna was published in 1890 in the first of a four-part edition of his work. As can be seen from the construction lines on the plan, the center of projection for the perspective lies just off the street.

Nodding to the combinatorial nature of creativity and the notion that to create is to copy, transform, and combine, Weston observes:

It takes only a few moments’ reflection to realize that many of the most potent ideas that have changed architecture are of this seemingly prosaic character. One of the most celebrated in Modern architecture, the free plan, for example, would have been impossible without the development of the central heating systems that liberated architects from the discipline of accommodating fireplaces and chimneys and, in time, teenagers from the constraints of continual parental supervision — just as the chimney had previously enabled the development of grand houses with many private rooms or apartments.

Idea # 35: CORRIDOR

Ubiquitous in complex institutional buildings such as many offices, schools, and hospitals, the corridor is a surprisingly recent invention, dating back only to the eighteenth century.

Idea # 49: THE ELEVATOR

Top right: The 1930s offered no more compelling illustration of the intensity of development made possible by the elevator than the New York skyline; the 102-story Empire State Building, seen in the distance, remained the world’s tallest until the 1970s.

Architectural histories emphasize the structural frames that made possible the tall buildings that have transformed cities worldwide. Equally important, however, was the passenger elevator, without which frequent circulation beyond a few stories becomes impracticable.

Idea # 63: ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE

Right: The Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava frequently claims inspiration from nature, as seen here in the Quadracci Pavilion, a major addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum completed in 2001. The fully glazed reception hall is surmounted by an adjustable, winglike sunscreen (above) while the galleria (right) is said to have been inspired by a wave, and to resemble the bleached bones of a shark.

Idea # 70: AXONOMETRIC PROJECTION

Right: Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement, employed abstract colored planes and axonometric projection to evoke his vision of an ideal spiritual world, floating free of gravity.

Axonometric projection is one of several means of representing a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface; unlike the more familiar technique of perspective projection it does not suggest how the object might appear to the eye. Lines to not converge to one or more vanishing points but remain parallel, enabling all dimensions to be preserved true to chosen scale.

Idea # 78: MORPHOLOGY

Right: During the 1950s the Finnish architect Reima Pietilä (1923-93) undertook an imaginative series of morphological studies of natural phenomena: supremely elegant, the resulting drawings and models exerted a decisive influence on his later architectural work.

Idea # 97: BIGNESS

In 1994, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder and principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), wrote that 'In a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility.'

At once an essential primer and a useful timeline, 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture is quite possibly the best thing since Matthew Frederick’s modern classic, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School.

Images courtesy of Laurence King

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Freeman Dyson on Tool-Creation, Technology, and What Makes a Scientific Revolution

“In every human culture, the hand and the brain work together to create the style that makes a civilization.”

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, Steve Jobs famously said, “you can only connect them looking backwards.” The same is true of technology and its impact on civilization — thousands of years later, we are able to appreciate the linkage between the products of our mind and the tools we create to further their reach. This is the basic lens of The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolution (public library) by legendary Princeton physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson (father of science historian George Dyson), originally published in 1999. Tool-creation has been indispensable to scientific progress, Dyson argues — and has been since the dawn of techne.

Science originated from the fusion of two old traditions, the tradition of philosophical thinking that began in ancient Greece and the tradition of skilled crafts that began even earlier and flourished in medieval Europe. Philosophy supplied the concepts for science, and skilled crafts provided the tools.

Dyson refutes the idea that scientific revolutions are concept-driven, a stance pioneered by Thomas Kuhn in his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and later endorsed by other theory-driven scientists. Instead, Dyson argues, the art of tool-creation is its relationship to science.

The human heritage that gave us toolmaking hands and inquisitive brains did not die. In every human culture, the hand and the brain work together to create the style that makes a civilization….

Science will continue to generate unpredictable new ideas and opportunities. And human beings will continue to respond to new ideas and opportunities with new skills and inventions. We remain toolmaking animals, and science will continue to exercise the creativity programmed into our genes.

Sole discovery, Dyson asserts, is simply inadequate to account for change. Instead, real, functional projects are the basis of revolutions, implicitly adding to history’s greatest definitions of science:

A sustainable project marks the beginning of a new era. An unsustainable project marks the end of an old era.

Lexi Lewtan is an avid reader, writer, and technology nerd. You can find her on geeking out on Twitter and Quora.

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Powershift: Alvin Toffler on the Age of Post-Fact Knowledge and the Super-Symbolic Economy (1990)

“We are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context, and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge.”

More than twenty years ago, in 1990, writer and futurist Alvin Toffler, whom you might recall as the author of the Future Shock, penned Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (public library) — a visionary lens on how social, political, and economic power structures are changing at the dawn of the information age, presaging many of today’s cultural paradigms and touching on other timely topics like networked knowledge, the role of intuition, and the value of adding context.

In Chapter 2, titled “Muscle, Money, and Mind,” Toffler lays the foundation of his core argument — the idea that knowledge is becoming the key currency of a new super-symbolic economy, leaving behind the materiality of the industrial age:

Knowledge itself … turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put differently, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the world.

But it isn’t until Chapter 8, titled “The Ultimate Substitute,” that Toffler’s vision truly shines as he offers an elegant definition of the knowledge economy and the dramatic shifts in social currency that we’re only just beginning to see reach a tipping point today:

All economic systems sit upon a ‘knowledge base.’

[…]

At rare moments in history the advance of knowledge has smashed through old barriers. The most important of these breakthroughs has been the invention of new tools for thinking and communication, like the ideogram… the alphabet… the zero… and in our century, the computer.

[…]

Today we are living through one of those exclamation points in history when the entire structure of human knowledge is once again trembling with change as old barriers fall. We are not just accumulating more ‘facts’ — whatever they may be. Just as we are now restructuring companies and whole economies, we are totally reorganizing the production and distribution of knowledge and the symbols used to communicate it.

What does this mean?

It means that we are creating new networks of knowledge … linking concepts to one another in startling ways … building up amazing hierarchies of inference … spawning new theories, hypotheses, and images, based on novel assumptions, new languages, codes, and logics. Businesses, governments, and individuals are collecting and storing more sheer data than any previous generation in history (creating a massive, confusing gold mine for tomorrow’s historians.)

But more important, we are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context, and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge.

Not all this new knowledge is factual or even explicit. Much knowledge, as the term is used here, is unspoken, consisting of assumptions piled atop assumptions, of fragmentary models, of unnoticed analogies, and it includes not simply logical and seemingly unemotional information data, but values, the products of passion and emotion, not to mention imagination and intuition.

It is today’s gigantic upheaval in the knowledge base of society — not computer hype or mere financial manipulation — that explains the rise of a super-symbolic economy.

Powershift follows Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980).

Image HT It’s Okay To Be Smart

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Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects

The ever-expanding definition and cultural role of design in the age of sensors, data, and responsive interfaces.

It is a privilege to have someone in your life who is both a good friend and a personal hero. I’m fortunate to count among those rare gifts MoMA Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli — design oracle, crusader for humanized technology, curious octopus — whose shows continue to define and redefine design, expanding our understanding of it not only as a creative discipline but also as a cultural translator, social lubricant, and “interface between progress and humanity.” Her latest exhibition, titled Talk to Me, which ran between July 24th and November 7th, 2011, explored with an unparalleled blend of excitement and insight the evolving communication between people and objects — a relationship all the more palpable, quite literally so, in our age of ubiquitous sensors and data feeds and interfaces, yet still rooted in our inextricable and increasingly complex relationship with the physicality of the analog world.

Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects (public library) is itself a meta-object in the exhibition — exquisitely produced and thoughtfully constructed to contextualize and illuminate the nearly 200 projects in the show, this analog artifact flows beautifully and seamlessly into the digital and mechanical world it encapsulates. An embossed faux-pixelated cover invites you to touch the “interface” of the book. On many of the pages, QR codes let you leap into a specific project’s digital presence. The Cubitt Fax computerizes the printed page, exuding a kind of binary intimacy.

Antonelli writes in the introductory essay:

The bond between people and things has always been filled with powerful and unspoken sentiments going well beyond functional expectations and including attachment, love, possessiveness, jealousy, pride, curiosity, anger, even friendship and partnership.

And, indeed, the projects and objects featured span the entire spectrum of human intellectual and emotional investment. From the unapologetically analog and deeply personal, like Stefanie Posavec’s handmade visualizations and Nicholas Felton’s infographic life reports, to the widely exploratory and the wildly futuristic, like Christien Meindertsma’s brilliant PIG O5049 project and Daisy Ginsberg’s E.chromi “designer bacteria,” the works cover (and uncover) interfaces, tools, devices, data visualization, video games, websites, and many more facets of this curious cultural shift we are witnessing, exploring the intersection and interplay of these various conduits of communication.

Invisible City: What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal about New York (2010)

Wesley Grubbs and Mladen Balog of Pitch Interactive

Published in Wired magazine, November 2010

(En)tangled Word Bank (2009)

Greg McInerny (British, born 1977) of Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK, est. 1997) Stefanie Posavec (American, born 1981)

This visual comparison of the six editions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shows the changes Darwin made to the texts during his lifetime. Using data from online versions of the books, the designers created six wheels, each representing a different edition, with each chapter divided into sub-chapters, paragraphs (represented by a leaf shape), and sentences (represented by a smaller 'leaflet'). The sentences are colored blue or orange based on whether or not they will appear in the next edition—on whether or not they will survive. Changes representing scientific advances, adjustments in the author’s thought process, and conflicting sections in the text become apparent, with subtleties as well as major changes immediately revealed.

Talk to Me is also very much about locating the present:

In contrast to the twentieth-century triumph of semiotics, which looked down on communication as nothing but a mechanical transmission of coded meaning, the twenty-first century has begun as one of pancommunication — everything and everybody conveying content and meaning in all possible combinations, from one-on-one to everything-to-everybody. We now expect objects to communicate, a cultural shift made evident when we see children searching for buttons or sensors on a new object, even when the object has no batteries or plug.

Tio (2009)

Tim Holley (British, born 1985)

Tio is a bird-shaped light switch designed to teach children not to waste energy. Using a traffic stoplight’s color progression and a series of increasingly angry facial expressions, Tio lets children know how long the lights have been on, so they can decide when it is time to turn them off. The accompanying website allows them to see their energy-use patterns and explains where energy comes from and how harvesting it affects animals, plants, and the larger environment. Tio was developed for Onzo, a British company that provides energy utilities with data-capture and analysis services.

littleBits (2008)

Ayah Bdeir (Lebanese, born 1982)

Ayah Bdeir’s littleBits are a hardware library of preassembled circuit boards that connect to one another with magnets. Like Legos, which allow anyone to understand how to build structures without a complex engineering education, littleBits make a complex process intuitive, in this case assembling prototypes by snapping together electronic components. Thus littleBits allow non-experts to engage with electronics, letting anyone get a feel for working with circuits. Users have made, for instance, a garage-door opener, a coffeemaker, a pair of blinking shoes, and a joystick.

Antonelli’s talent for bridging the esoteric with the universal shines throughout:

In our relationship with objects, as in any relationship, indifference is the worst offense and laziness the worst sin.

Phantom Recorder (2010)

Revital Cohen (Israeli, born 1985)

Revital Cohen designs speculative, metaphysical objects that examine the relationship between the natural and artificial. The Phantom Recorder explores the phenomenon of the phantom limb: an amputee’s sensation that a missing limb is still attached to the body and functioning. 'The phantom owner is suddenly endowed with a unique and personal appendage,' Cohen explains, 'invisible to others and sometimes capable of extraordinary hyperabilities.' This physical hallucination is often treated as a hindrance and corrected through therapy, but Cohen feels that attempts to alleviate it 'tend to overlook poetic functions of our body.' What if, she wonders, the sensation could be harnessed and used at will? The conceptual interface Cohen created in response to this inquiry would connect the part of the brain that thinks it is controlling the missing limb to electrodes in a neural-implant device. This device could be activated to record or cause particular sensations. The potential for new ways to understand the communication between mind and body goes further, Cohen says: 'Could we use this technology to record illusions of the mind? What if our imagination could be captured through our nerves?'

My Wheel of Worry (2010)

Andrew Kuo (American, born 1977)

Andrew Kuo presents his inner worries, arguments, counterarguments, and obsessions in the form of charts and graphs. In the three-tiered graph my Wheel of Worry, originally published in the May 16. 2010, New York Times Magazine, Kuo illustrates the things in his life that concern him and his specific feelings about each. On the graph's innermost ring Kuo shows what causes him anxiety in the moments before sleep (loneliness, death, money, bedbugs, and the new York Knicks); in the middle ring he charts his very specific reactions to his credit card statement; on the outermost ring, what he thinks about as he scratches a lottery ticket. In this chart and others, Kuo brings the graphic language of scientific fact to the irrational emotions associated with everyday life.

Citing Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick and his five axioms of communication, defined in 1967, Paola examines how our paradigms of idea-transmission have both changed and remained the same half a century later:

The first axiom tells us, ‘One cannot not communicate.’ Any kind of gesture, behavior, and attitude can and will be interpreted as communication. In e-mail, for example, responding immediately to a message creates a particular subtext, as does not responding at all; a congratulatory message sent ‘reply all’ can be interpreted as displaying presence and authority or else insecurity, and an ill-advised response by a person who received only a blind copy reveals…something else.

The third axiom says, ‘The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners’ communication procedures.’ Communication, Watzlawick posits, is cyclical, with each partner believing that he or she is simply responding to the other; some of the most common problems of the digital era arise from the cycle of amplification and reaction that marks our text exchanges, something that serial e-mail gaffers and awkward users will be familiar with. The problem is acute enough to require the invention of ToneCheck, developed by Lymbix, an emotional spell-check for e-mail messages that alerts the writer to excessive displays of anger, sadness, or insensitivity.

Locals and Tourists, New York and London (2010)

Eric Fischer (American, born 1973)

Locals and Tourists uses geotagging data from the photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa to visualize the different areas frequented by locals and tourists in New York, London, and 124 other cities, including Taipei, Sydney, Berlin, and San Jose, California. After harvesting millions of data points in the form of photographs, Eric Fischer links them by photographer and date and then plots them on a city’s OpenStreetMap grid. A photographer with many shots of the same city and a long photo history can be assumed to be a local and is represented in blue, and someone whose photos are taken within a limited time period is assumed to be a tourist and represented in red; photographers whose status can’t be determined are represented in yellow.

Menstruation Machine–Takashi's Take (2010)

Sputniko! (British/Japanese, born Japan 1985) Design Interactions Department (est. 1989) Royal College of Art (UK, est. 1837)

With Menstruation Machine, Sputniko! explores the relationship between identity, biology, and choice, while also inquiring into the meaning of gender-specific rituals. The metal device, which looks like a chastity belt and is equipped with a blood-dispensing system and electrodes that stimulate the lower abdomen, replicates the pain and bleeding of the average five-day menstruation period. It is designed to be worn by men, children, postmenopausal women, or whoever else wants to experience menstruation. A music video that can be displayed with the device is about Takashi, who wants to understand what it feels like to be a girly girl. Takashi builds the Menstruation Machine and wears it out on the town with a girlfriend, strutting around a shopping mall and occasionally doubling over in pain. Thus an internal, private process is transformed into a wearable display of identity. Since the 1960s, advances in hormone-based contraception have, by suppressing ovulation, made monthly periods no longer biologically necessary. Sputniko! notes that the Menstruation Machine may be particularly desirable in a future in which menstruation in fact becomes obsolete.

In the introductory essay, Antonelli also exercises her remarkable gift for explaining technical terminology and complex systems in layman language that takes none of the substance away, breaking down the four main design disciplines covered in the show:

Communication design focuses on delivering messages, and it encompasses most graphic design, signage, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design, which is sometimes brought under the more generic and functionalist rubric of user-experience design, delineates the behavior of products and systems, as well as the experience that people will have with them. Information or visualization design includes the maps, diagrams, and visualization tools that filter and make sense of the enormous amount of information that is more widely available than ever before. Critical design is one of the most promising and far-reaching new areas of study, using conceptual scenarios built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors. Its disciples are experts in ‘What if?’

Rubik's Cube for the Blind (2010)

Konstantin Datz (German, born 1988)

Konstantin Datz has reimagined the popular Rubik’s Cube for people who cannot see the toy’s original colors. Datz stuck white panels embossed with the Braille words for each color over the squares, transforming the game from a visual puzzle into a tactile one.

Prayer Companion (2010)

Interaction Research Studio (est. 2000) Goldsmiths (UK, est. 1891) University of London (UK, est. 1836)

Developed for the nine Poor Clare Sisters who live at a monastery in York, UK, the Prayer Companion is a communication device with a very explicit purpose: it alerts the nuns to issues that need their prayers. The nuns, whose everyday lives have changed little since medieval times, have taken vows of enclosure, and their only connection to the outside world is through occasional access to Catholic newspapers, mail, and limited use of the telephone and computer. Designed to be understated and unobtrusive, the Prayer Companion subtly scrolls a ticker tape of issues across its top; its small screen can only be viewed from above and close-up, thus minimizing its distracting potential. The device was designed specifically for the nuns and is the only one of its kind. 'Goldie,' as the nuns call it, sits on a table in a hallway that they often pass through, scrolling news as well as the feelings of anonymous strangers whose blog entries are aggregated by the website We Feel Fine. The nuns have told Bill Gaver, of the Interaction Research Studio, that 'it has been valuable in keeping our prayers pertinent.'

More than anything, Talk to Me is about both challenging and owning design as a centripetal force of culture:

Talk to Me is an opportunity to anchor design’s new dimension and highlight innovative interfaces that can inform designers in the future. Whether they use the skin and shell of objects as an interface or animate them from within, designers are using the whole world to communicate and are set on a path that is transforming it into an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.

[…]

It might seem that design has abandoned its tested, grounded, functionalist territory to venture into an ambiguous universe where its essence is confused and a crisis of identity arises — is the 5th Dimensional Camera art or scientific modeling? Is Humeau’s work creative paleontology? Are Sputniko!’s devices contributing to interpretive anthropology? Is Pachube mere coding and infrastructure engineering? Not at all. I claim them, with their powerful vision and their focus on knowledge and awareness, as design, and I praise their radical functionalism. Ambiguity and ambivalence — the ability to inhabit different environments and frames of mind at the same time — have become central to our cultural development. They are qualities that embody the openness and flexibility necessary for embracing diversity, and they are critical to the questioning and imagining that are the preferred methods of inquiry. Communication is at the nexus of all these necessary human features: the most critical function of design today.

Several essays by prominent cross-disciplinary thinkers contextualize the various thematic sections. In one titled “Reality Is Plenty, Thanks: Twelve Arguments for Keeping the Naked Eye Naked,” the always-thoughtful Kevin Slavin asks:

As parlor tricks go, [virtual reality] is a neat one. Reality is built on human perception, entering consciousness through the human eye. If you add to the stack, you have something like reality, only more. But more what?

In another essay, “Conversations with the Network,” Khoi Vinh observes:

The designer as author, as craftsperson bringing together beginning, middle, and end, becomes redundant in a space in which every participant forges his or her own beginning, middle, and end. And that is exactly what happens in networked media. The narrative recedes, and the behavior of the design solution becomes prominent. What becomes important are questions that concern not the author but the users. How does the system respond to the input of its users? When a user says something to the system, how does the system respond?

At its heart, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects — like the show itself, and the entirety of Antonelli’s work — is the essence of what true curation is: Context, conscience, cultural curiosity, and, above all, a point of view of what matters in the world and why.

Exhibition images and image captions courtesy of MoMA

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