At the newly renovated Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, visitors can digitally flip through the institution’s wallpaper archive and project favourite prints onto the walls.
"What will you design?"
At the newly expanded Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum that opened earlier this month in Manhattan, this is one of the key questions confronting visitors at interactive touchscreen tables.
In reimagining itself for the 21st century, the Cooper Hewitt, the only Smithsonian outpost outside of Washington, D.C., has aimed to do nothing less than transform the museum experience itself. Where most institutions encourage visitors to study historic relics or priceless artworks from a distance, this one entices them to roll up their sleeves and become active participants in the design process.
"You can admire design objects until you're blue in the face," says Cooper Hewitt director Caroline Baumann. "But we want you to jump in, know what it feels like to think as a designer and solve real-world problems. We're really taking the dust off of Cooper Hewitt and saying this is the place where we talk about design in a relevant and exciting way."
On the 15 touchscreen tables scattered throughout the facility, most of which are roughly the size of a dining table, wannabe designers are invited to sketch their own building, chair, hat or other objects in three dimensions, while design buffs can delve into the museum's archive of more than 210,000 design objects, which span more than 30 centuries. In the Immersion Room, visitors are able to digitally flip through the wallpaper archive and project favourite patterns across the walls – before blasting them with a design of their own.
In the Process Lab, they're encouraged to make physical prototypes – one of the options is to make impromptu shades from household materials for Lindsay Adelman light fixtures – or to brainstorm improvements for everyday objects, such as bicycles, medication bottles and newspapers, and to share them with other museum-goers.
Not quite ready for the opening, but due to follow in early 2015, is an interactive pen that will be loaned to every visitor. The pen enables one to virtually capture favourite objects on display. At the end of the visit, it will automatically generate a personalized website with those pieces so they can be explored further at home or shared with friends.
All of these elements are housed in Andrew Carnegie's former mansion, a historic landmark completed in 1902, where ornate restored woodwork serves as a foil to many of the futuristic designs and technology on display.
During three years of renovations, Cooper Hewitt officials assembled what Baumann calls a "dream team" of 13 design firms to rethink almost every aspect of its operations. Gluckman Mayner Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle oversaw the architectural changes, which expanded exhibition space by 60 per cent. Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed a new museum shop, visitor desk, secondary entrance and display cases. Pentagram created a bold new visual identity for the museum. Chester Jenkins of Village even designed an assertive new typeface, named Cooper Hewitt, which can be downloaded free from the museum's website.
Of course, the real stars of the show remain the design objects themselves. For the launch, more than 700 pieces are being showcased in 10 different exhibitions. One of the largest is Tools: Extending Our Reach, which presents everything from a 1.85-million-year-old "chopper" hand tool from Tanzania (essentially a jagged sliver of rock) to a 1970s toolkit designed for space travel to the RoboBee, the world's smallest flying robot, developed by a team of Harvard engineers.
Aesthetes looking for provocative furniture, accessories and fabrics will also want to visit Making Design, which presents key pieces from the Cooper Hewitt's collection. Some represent the best of early-20th-century design, such as Marcel Breuer's sinuous 1936 bent-plywood Long Chair. Others offer poetic modernism, such as Ingo Maurer's 2010 Porca Miseria! chandelier, which resembles a cluster of exploding plates. Still others represent the cutting edge of contemporary manufacturing, such as Michael Eden's intricate 3D-printed Tall Green Bloom urn.
Examining the world of design with an incredibly wide lens, dynamic presentations and inventive experiences, the Cooper Hewitt has transformed itself into a must-visit destination for anyone with an interest in the objects that surround us. "We're really expanding the boundaries," says Baumann, "of what you get as a visitor here."