I visit museums to admire and understand the work produced by the most talented people in their fields, not to try my hand at doing what they do. That means I’m probably not the ideal visitor for the reconceived, interactive Cooper Hewitt that has finally reopened after a too-long, three-year hiatus.
All photos by Lee Rosenbaum
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the artistry and utility of good design. But when I see great art, I don’t feel inspired to make some myself. Similarly, when I see great design, I don’t feel inspired to become a designer. My own talent (to the extent I have some) lies in constructing with words, not by hand.
So the new “play designer” vibe rocking the maker-friendly Cooper Hewitt is lost on me, as you can see from this lame attempt to drape green cellophane over a lamp armature (an exercise intended to let me experiment with changing the quality of the bulb’s light):
I give all due credit to the NY Times‘ William Grimes, who gamely accepted the challenge in the museum’s vaunted “Process Lab,” just off its lobby, where you are invited “play designer.” One of the suggested exercises involves taking two items out of you pocket and trying to design something new and useful from them.
My own pocket contained a tissue and a smartphone. This immediately suggested a solution to a problem that has long preoccupied me: I can do almost everything I want (and a lot of things I don’t) with my phone, but I cannot wipe my nose with it. I skillfully inserted the edge of my tissue under the top front edge of my phone cover and voilà!
Not only can I now wipe my nose with my phone, but the tissue also protects the privacy of the family members pictured on my home screen and softens the quality of light emanating from it.
All in a day’s work for the Dilettante Designer!
As Grimes reports, museum officials prefer that you tour the Cooper Hewitt from the bottom up. As it happened, no one else was sitting at the hands-on Process Lab tables while I was designing my SneezePhone:
If you’re like me, you’ll want to move on, as quickly as possible (before committing any more design crimes), to the second and third floors, where you can admire objects conceived by minds more gifted than yours.
There is much throughout the permanent collection displays (supplemented with many loans from the Cooper Hewitt’s fellow Smithsonian institutions) to delight the eye and mind, and to raise questions like: Is there anything that retired New York dealer and omnivorous connoisseur Eugene Thaw didn’t collect?
Gift of Eugene and Clare Thaw
But for me, the overall effect of the installations was scattershot. The introductory wall text for the second-floor permanent-collection galleries tries to make a virtue of anarchy:
Our various collections intermingle, integrating the historical with the contemporary, juxtaposing cultures, and presenting centuries-old craft traditions alongside current manufacturing techniques and new ways of making things.
Consequently, we get the tired Swiss-army-knife cliché in a case that commingles prehistoric hand axes, including this…
…with an actual Swiss multipurpose knife (updated with a USB flash drive) and a first-generation iPhone—“the multitasking tool of the digital age.” Point taken.
Also scattershot are the object labels—sometimes informative, sometimes barebones and too often frustratingly far away from the objects they are intended to elucidate (particularly in the case of the wooden staircase models, pictured above). I hope that, over time, the juxtapositions and interpretive information will be informed by deeper curatorial intelligence.
My guess is that too much staff time and attention got sidetracked from creating an intellectually satisfying, object-centered experience to devising the interactive digital enhancements that the Cooper Hewitt is trumpeting and has apparently staked its future on.
Visitors are encouraged to step away from the displays to spend time at the multipurpose interactive tables interspersed throughout the museum. They epitomize both the DIY vibe and the scattershot approach.
To illustrate, here’s my video of the orientation that I received from Tim O’Keeffe, the helpful staffer at the interactive table near the ticketing desk. You’ll see Tim create something else that I never thought of—the pot-hat:
The planned linchpin of the digital experience, which Tim refers to in the video, is the Interactive Pen, glowingly described to us by the Cooper Hewitt’s director, Caroline Baumann, at last June’s press briefing as a “global first” and a “paradigm shift.” Unfortunately, it won’t be available until some time next month, having missed its due date (because of manufacturing delays, not design issues, according to the museum).
For now, it’s on the premises only as an object in a display case:
According to Sebastian Chan, the Cooper Hewitt’s director of digital and emerging media, the pen (offered to each visitor, who must return it at the end of the visit) gives you a personal web URL (printed on your ticket) where you can store bookmarks linking to all the museum’s online information for objects (including loans) that you have selected by tapping the back of the pen on a symbol that appears on each object label (as you can see at the upper right of this label for an Edison lightbulb:
You can also use the pen to draw your own designs on the interactive table and to save them for retrieval on your smartphone, computer or tablet.
But enough with technology! You probably want to see what the renovated and reconceived Carnegie Mansion and its displays look like.
COMING SOON: My photo-essay tour (with commentary) for the new Cooper Hewitt.