MoMA – Design and the Elastic Mind

This post comes a little late since the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has already finished. However, the accompanying online exhibition, with its intuitive cross-referencing interface, is seriously cool and worth exploring!

Here is what the exhibition is all about:

Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.

Amongst these, sometimes eccentric, objects that people can actually understand and use, is for example the Accessories for Lonely Men project:

…eight electronic devices designed to alleviate loneliness by simulating the—sometimes annoying—traces that one’s companion would normally leave behind. The collection includes a Sheet Thief, which “winds the bedclothes up on the other side of the bed while you’re sleeping,” the designer says. Other joys of sharing a bed are re-created with Cold Feet and a Heavy Breather that breathes hot air down the user’s neck. In the morning the Hair Alarm Clock swings hair across the user’s face to wake him, while the steel finger of the Chest-Hair Curler gently swirls his chest hair in concentric circles. Other Accessories include Shared Smoke, which comes into its own after a solitary sex act; Plate Thrower, a rapid-fire plate launcher; and Silhouette Light, which projects the silhouette of a woman onto the wall.

Brilliant…