I've been greatly anticipating the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition to open for the past month now.... and even though I'm not in NYC to able to experience it first-hand, I spent hours deeply immersed & captivated by it's on-line component, (via a sharp treatment from no other than Yugo Nakamura). I highly recommend you explore the website, which offers over 300 works to get your neurons firing and warm your heart. And if you are in NYC, please do us a favor, and go go go!

Online Exhibit >>

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration. 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.

Thinkering
Many designers, scientists, and artists have turned to design to give method to their productive tinkering, or what John Seely Brown has called "thinkering." They all belong to a new culture in which experimentation is guided by engagement with the world and open, constructive collaboration with colleagues and other specialists. Whether in the form of origami, nanofacture, or growth and aggregation, thinkering gives shape to the embryonic dialogue between design and science.





Super Nature
Contemporary designers view nature not only as a repository of harmonious forms, but also as a collection of sensible and sustainable structures that use less matter and energy and are more efficient than traditional man-made systems. Super Nature includes a collection of projects that explore technologies based on biological systems and adapt specific advantages observed in natural organisms into human technology.



People and Objects
Design has expanded into new fields, including the interactions between people and objects. Responsive design features objects that respond to our needs rather than awaiting our instructions. The tagging of information in our environment makes the world into a live information platform. New interfaces incorporate instinctive human traits, expanding our relationships with the objects they enable us to access.







Design for Debate
Design for Debate is a new type of practice that devises ways to discuss the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies by presenting not only artifacts, but also the quizzical scenarios that go with them. These projects shamelessly place the human being at the center of the universe and seek to take into account scientific and technological progress while respecting and preserving our essence as individuals.







Visualization
We live in an age when information is more prolific and widely available than ever before, and to visualize it is to understand it. The projects in this category demonstrate the ways in which designers and scientists tackle the extremely small and the extremely large in order to bring them to a human scale, facilitating our ability to comprehend great amounts of data.







Thought to Action
Designers have been working to envision not just objects, but also new methods of manufacture and behavioral rules that establish the future of design forms and capabilities. 3-D printing enables digital images to be directly printed into objects. Processing is a new design tool that, despite its simplicity, is valuable in high-level design projects. And algorithms define how objects will evolve and respond to their circumstances, which, in a way, gives them lives of their own.







All Together Now!
All Together Now! explores the modulation of the relationship between individuals and the collective sphere. This collection of objects introduces the concept of Existenzmaximum, examines the impact that the open-source movement and ubiquitous connection are having on design and on the world, and identifies designers engaged with local energy harvesting to alleviate our burden on the shared environment.

Freedom of Creation is a design + research company based in Amsterdam. Their designers are deeply inspired by nature... and her growth patterns.



Their designs for lighting fixtures are infused with the mathematical elegance and beauty of the fibonacci.



Some of their designs are inspired by planetary movements.



And some of their textile designs take a playful + pop approach to mobius strips.