Design Comes Alive – Cooper Hewitt Museum, NYC

In our recent travels to New York City we visited one of the city’s art and design gems: the newly renovated Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Established by its founders in 1897 as a resource for students and professionals in the Arts of Decoration, “Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, [who] intended it as “a practical working laboratory,” where students and designers could be inspired by actual objects.” The recent renovation of the museum has kept that mission alive using technology in a way the founders could not have envisioned. For visitors, the new Cooper Hewitt is an interactive design experience unlike any other.

At the entrance, you are given an electronic pen that can be used for creating a personal, visual diary of the visit. Any object that catches your interest may be recorded in your diary by touching the pen to its corresponding label. More information about the object can then be accessed on touch screen tables situated among the galleries. The objects that you collect or create during your visit can be recalled on a personal website created for you by the Cooper Hewitt. Future museum visits can be added, too. The diary that you create serves as a reminder of your visit, a learning or research tool or simply as future inspiration. The images above are some of the objects we added to our digital diary; items that we enjoyed and found inspiring.

Another remarkable interactive display that fans of surface design will enjoy is the Immersion Room. Here a visitor can select wall covering design samples from the permanent collection and have them projected in repeat from floor to ceiling in full living color on the walls of the room. Or visitors can have fun creating their own designs on a touch screen table and have the outcome projected on the walls in real time. The results of this design exercise can be saved in the diary, and we can’t help thinking may inspire a whole future generation of surface pattern designers.

More information: Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum