Icon Buzz - Designs & Arts

MoMA’s ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘ opens tonight with over 200 objects on display exploring the relationship between design, science and innovation. The exhibition focuses on the role of the designer to help the general public adapt and understand rapid technological advancement and the changing human condition in the contemporary world. (Whew!) Here’s the pitch:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.

Design and the Elastic Mind
February 24 - May 12, 2008
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street (btwn. Fifth & Sixth ave.)
New York, NY 10019

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The ‘Lunchbox Laboratory’ prototype is the outcome of an interesting collaboration between the artist group Futurefarmers and the Biological Sciences Team, National Renewable Energy Lab.

Currently scientists are using algae to produce hydrogen and have discovered that it is a viable renewable energy form, in that, algae is everywhere and it could also be used to produce biodiesel. One of the main hurdles for the research is to find the most productive strains of algae. Since there are potentially millions of strains, this task is monumental.Lunchbox Laboratory is a prototype for a potentially distributed research tool that would be sent to schools such that young scientists could do primary screening of a collection of algae strains. This would serve as a preliminary screening such that non productive strains would be ruled out and only productive strains would reach labs. This project enables students to participate in big science as well as network with other students nationwide to compare notes.

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A dominate focal point of Design and the Elastic Mind is the large wall relief ‘Rules of Six’ by architects Aranda/Lasch, commissioned for this exhibition. Using Rhino3D, high-density foam and a live algorithm, the piece is an experimentation which explories self-assembly and modularity across scales. Sound complex? Check out some of their previous studies here.

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