MoMA show explores science and design

“I was looking at designers talking to scientists, and I realized that the computer has made the membrane between design and science and technology much more permeable,” says Paola Antonelli, curator for “Design and the Elastic Mind,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Among the exhibition’s more than 200 objects, installations, and projects is the scanning electron micrograph shown here. It shows the device that physicists Keith Schwab and Michael Roukes, then both of Caltech, used in 1999 to demonstrate quantized thermal transport (see Physics Today, June 2000, page 17 ). Other scientific and engineering work is also featured in the exhibition. “I see a bunch of strange technology,” Schwab, who is now at Cornell University, says of the exhibition. “The artists have this conversation that is hard for me to understand.” (Figure courtesy of Michael Roukes and Keith Schwab)

“People have to compute huge amounts of information every day, and we change from the individual scale to getting online and connecting to the whole world,” explains Antonelli. “That’s where the idea of elasticity came from—our minds today have to develop elastic muscles.” Using scientific advances, designers—artists, architects, fashion designers, and others—“are the ones who create objects that help us take advantage of our capacity to adapt.”

The exhibition runs through 12 May; see also http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind .