Design and the Elastic Mind

I recently went to the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Here is the website text describing the rationale behind the 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.

The group that I visited with included a mathematician, a music journalist, an obstetrician, three seven year-olds, and me. I was absolutely stunned at the ability of nearly all of the projects to appeal to everyone in that group. The web site is worth a look, with everything from computer animation of the Dicer enzyme to curved origami to "accessories for lonely men." Link.