The News 03.17.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Today, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History opened its 15,000 square-foot Hall of Human Origins (original link no longer available). It looks nice. Lots of skulls | March is Women in History Month; to celebrate, the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum has a four-part online exhibition Women on Stamps | A behind-the-scenes video of The First Ladies at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History | The MoMA’s changing wall colors, from their blog (link no longer available) | An interactive matrix of green design strategies | Congratulations to Bisphenol A (BPA) — found in my friend vinyl — for its win at The Toxies in the category “Worst Breakthrough Performance and Viewer’s Choice Award for Worst Chemical of 2009” | Kinetic sculptures are awesome: Magic Wave by Reuben Margolin, and the BMW Museum’s kinetic sculpture | “Moomin Valley,” designed for a family entertainment center, is adorable and clever | I love, love, love, Tara Donovan. If you’re anywhere near Indianapolis between April 4 and August 1, you need to see her show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art | Tomás Saraceno (link added in 2021; very cool website) collaborated with astrophysicists, architects, engineers and arachnologists (spider researchers!) for this interactive art installation based on “the imagery and structure of spider webs to map the origin and structure of the universe” | Bruno Maag’s typographic exhibition Shape My Language in which “long streams of clear plastic cards hang from the ceiling, engulfing the gallery visitors in a typographic mist.”

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken link has been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 17 March 2010.

The News 03.02.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

Design Museum Boston (update: now simply, Design Museum) is all set to pop-up in the window of an abandoned storefront near you | A video tour of the “Biology Range” at the New York State Museum, where they keep their preserved biological specimens | The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart has the World’s Largest Artificial Tornado inside; the ventilation system draws in smoke from the building and sends it up and out an exhaust vent | Another German museum, another car museum: exploded views from the Porsche Museum (also in Stuttgart) and the Harley Davidson Museum (in Milwaukee) | If cars are not your thing but exploded views are, you might instead enjoy one of an Etch A Sketch | Multiple Shadow House by Olafur Eliasson at the Tonya Bonakdar Gallery in NY: “The individual lights are all different colors, but they create white light when they all blend on a single wall. As visitors walk in front of the light sources, that hides certain colors — thus freeing the rest to reveal themselves as colored shadows.” | The One Day Poem Pavilion “demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow.”

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken link has been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 2 March 2010.

The News 02.23.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

The Center for the Future of Museums on gestural interfaces and 3-D printers | At the end of the month, the exhibition Design for the Other 90%, from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, will be closing at the Mercy Corps Action Center in Portland, Oregon. The exhibition will reopen in April at the National Geographic Museum in DC | In New York? Check out the art exhibition, Size DOES Matter, curated by Shaquille O’Neal. “This is art, people. This right here is art.” (Were you able to see Big! at the National Archives in DC before it closed? A small, deliberate, interesting exhibition … that also included a shoe belonging to Shaq. Here’s the review from the New York Times) | Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait by Chris Jordan (originally via The Age of Impossible Numbers, a slideshow from Seed Magazine) | We Remember the Frankfurt Victims of the Shoa the Jewish Museum Frankfurt.

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Post updated in January 2021 with text edits. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 23 February 2010.

The News 02.09.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

“...The abandoned Tremont Street Subway tunnel, which runs underneath Boston Common ... becomes a network of underground cultural venues, including a theater, a cinema, art galleries, and a ‘media-infused trolley museum.’” From the winning proposal for the SHIFTboston Ideas Competition | How Different Types of Museums Approach Participation, from Museum 2.0 | Aquarium Design: Top 10 Trends, from ObjectIDEA | Easy=True (link no longer available) | Museum admissions tabs: part ticket, part souvenir; Tag, You're It! | ExhibitFiles has launched a new “Bits” feature | A Parallel Image light installation at Transmediale, the festival for art and digital culture in Berlin; “an electronic camera obscura ... media-archaeological, interactive sculpture.” Your guess as to what that means is probably better than mine | “Four days into the show, sufficient personal injury had been incurred — with ambulances being called in and a first aid unit being erected inside the Tate — that the Director, Norman Reid, decided to close the exhibition.” Neo Classic at the Tate, 1971.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 9 February 2010.