Design and the Elastic Mind

August 13, 2009 11:24 PM

Design and the Elastic Mind Companion to a 2008 exhibition that "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. The Web site presents over three hundred of those works." Browse through works in areas such as tinkering, people and objects, and visualization.

Shamelessly copied from here

posted by hortense (7 comments total)

Whoa. That's like Web 6.0. I don't even know how to begin.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:32 PM on August 13, 2009

Ok, that site takes some serious getting used to, but I've been having fun looking at all the crazy crazy on there. Some stuff is really cool, Brainbow! Steak Zombies Exquisite Corpse! Others not so much...Flyhead Helmet, wtf? In fact there seemed to be a lot of ideas involving helmets. Don't these people know that helmets are the superhero capes of the nerd science world?
posted by iamkimiam at 11:50 PM on August 13, 2009

Awesome exhibition and a lot of fun: my friends Paul and William exhibited their awesome work (see nanofacture).

The thing we most enjoyed were Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters. (To get a quick idea of the concept look at some videos.
posted by lalochezia at 12:04 AM on August 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

Fill with Gregorian chants, thus defeating the sarcasm.
posted by longsleeves at 12:05 AM on August 14, 2009

Oooh, shadow monsters is really playful and great! I wish there was a way to navigate/search/link the exhibition; I can't find nanofacture for the life of me. Did find some other cool stuff though. The Humans vs. Chimps showed the very, very few bits of DNA code that differentiate the two species. That was neat. 'Living Sensors' is a really cool idea, taken in an extremely strange direction. The miniature flying robots, for surveillance etc., is probably the scariest one yet (see Flybot).

Didn't mean to write 'crazy crazy' in earlier post, but rather 'crazy shit/stuff' = 'wild shit/stuff'.
posted by iamkimiam at 12:41 AM on August 14, 2009

That UI is actually a lot more intuitive than it looks. Try scrolling your mouse wheel.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:44 AM on August 14, 2009

Here's a Seed article by Paola Anotonelli, that nicely sums up the exhibit and the idea of mental elasticity.
posted by Casimir at 5:47 AM on August 14, 2009