"But Foreclosed seethes with disdain for the suburbs, and the lack of an empathetic understanding of how the suburbs function and are changing, ultimately makes the exhibit look less visionary than ignorant…

These radical visions that are so insensitive to the suburbs remind me of the Modernist public housing projects that were once foisted on inner cities. Created by well-intentioned but essentially ignorant architects and planners, those buildings made sense in theory but not in practice. They didn’t respond to the rhythms and needs of the people who would be housed there, because the architects didn’t really respect or understand the lives of poor people. MoMA should have found some architects who could love and live in the suburbs, showing us the way to make the most of suburban housing instead of wishing it didn’t exist."

"Doug Rickard (American, born 1968) studied United States history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to photography. He has drawn on this background in research for his series A New American Picture, which focuses on places in the United States where unemployment is high and educational opportunities are few. On a virtual road trip, Rickard located these sites remotely using the Street View feature of the website Google Maps, which has mapped and photographed every street in the country. Scrutinizing the Google Maps pictures, he composed images on his computer screen, which he then photographed using a digital camera. The resulting pictures—digitally manipulated to remove the Google watermark and cropped to a panoramic format—comment on poverty and racial equity in the United States, the bounty of images on the web, and issues of personal privacy."

"Inhabitat's Jill Fehrenbacher interviews MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli about her latest MoMA exhibit on the future of interaction design 'Talk To Me'"

"New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors."

"Polymaps, Mapnik, and TileStache software<br />
<br />
prettymaps are interactive maps that integrate data from freely available sources into multidimensional renderings of different places. The application pulls geographic data from open-mapping projects—including street-level data from OpenStreetMap, land-formation data from Natural Earth, and place-specific data from Flickr—and plots them atop one another. Users can view the maps at varying degrees of detail, zooming from a view of the world to a view of a single neighborhood. They are visually striking, with cities transformed into colorful abstractions, but the shapes are recognizable for anyone already familiar with the terrain."

"Carry MoMA with you wherever you go. Use the MoMA App to find out what’s on at the Museum, plan a visit, browse or search tens of thousands of works in the collection, take multimedia tours, or learn about artists and art terms. Take a picture of a work of art and send it to a friend, or put together a playlist to create a soundtrack for your MoMA visit."

"One would be tempted to say that the contemporary museum is a machine for ‘slipping glimpses’ – to misappropriate Willem de Kooning’s famous description of his painting, while noting that the essence of appreciating his work consists in looking hard and long at what he captured in a blink of the eye and the flick of a wrist. But, in truth, the mechanisms in play are horridly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps, pumps them peristaltically through its digestive tract in a semi-delirious state, and then flushes them out the other end with their pockets lighter and with almost no memory of their ‘museum experience’ other than a mild anaesthetic hangover. In short, one leaves the halls of culture much as one does a colonoscopy clinic."

"past year is culmination of decade-long effort to change museum's character, to turn it "interactive," place where people come to see, but also be seen; to not just look at art but participate in it. MoMA has made its mission to transform "into a social space from an treasure trove," according to the director…

But a resulting influx of people through the doors has lead influential art worlders like Robert Storr to lament rise of "Death Star Museums." These are places where "uninterrupted contemplation" is impossible. More people may be coming to contemp art museums, Mr. Storr wrote…, but "the mechanisms in play are horridly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps."

"Museums of modern art are a kind of inherently unstable space," Mr. Lowry said. "If you're going to follow flow of contemp art, you have to constantly tweak & adjust. You can't lock it down & say this is what it should be for the next 10 years. Artists are moving much faster than that.""

"Designers find themselves today at the center of an extraordinary wave of cross-pollination. Because of their role as intermediaries between research and production, they often act as the primary interpreters in interdisciplinary teams, called upon not only to conceive objects, but also to devise scenarios and strategies. To cope with this responsibility, designers need to set the foundations for a theory of design and become astute generalists. At that point, they will be in a unique position to become the repositories of contemporary culture's need for analysis and synthesis, society's new pragmatic intellectuals. As scientists increasingly embrace this role of the designer, and also recognize in designers like-minded innovative thinking, science will become design's most precious ally."

"In the One Year Performances, especially the first four, Mr. Hsieh did not make his life his art. Instead, with Classical precision and unquestionable monstrousness, he expanded his art until it fully occupied, consumed and suspended his life." More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/arts/design/01sont.html?&pagewanted=all

"Some of the world's most famous architects have tried to use mass production techniques to design houses. Now, an exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art explores the history of the prefab house. The exhibit comes as computer design is revolutionizing the way prefabricated houses are constructed."

"“Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” is a delightful surprise...presents more than 80 projects, from humble experiments in suburban living to stunning works of creative imagination."

"“Home Delivery” offered the perfect opportunity to bring together architects’ current interest in digital fabrication with the general public’s nostalgia for Modernist prefab designs, and to do an exhibition that was both contemporary and histori

"Her ability to speak plainly and clearly reinforces her point about designers and their role in society. (And if you don’t agree, consider what sort of garbage she could have said, or rather that most would have said, speaking about such a trendy oh-so

"One of the greatest pleasures of...is watching people outside those discourses discover these things for the first time. The show is complete sensory overload...the civilians were literally freaking out because they had no idea any of this existed"

"offers "behind scenes" look into entire process of creating & erecting prefab architecture. As part of exhibition which will be on view at MOMA from July 20-October 20, 2008, the Museum selected 5 architects to display full-scale prefab houses in outdoo

"Much of this is being done by bona fide designers, but scientists and artists have also turned to design to give method to their productive tinkering, what John Seely Brown has called "thinkering." They all belong to a new culture in which experimentation is guided by engagement in the world and by open, constructive collaboration with colleagues and other specialists." ... "...importance of "critical design," or "design for debate," which he defines as a way of using design as a medium to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life"

"Design as a tool for learning can increase our understanding and appreciation of the world around us, as well as enable designers to participate in a wider technological, cultural and environmental discourse creating the world of the future"

"Just as we seem to have more faith in design than ever, just as design seems to be exploding, we are also faced with a culture for which design (as conventionally practiced) is simply not appropriate anymore."

"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 u

"“Design and the Elastic mind” is the most uplifting show MoMA’s architecture and design department has presented since the museum reopened in 2004. Thanks to its imaginative breadth, we can begin to dream again."

"Although fascination with organic form...since Renaissance...now entered age in which designers & architects...drawing inspiration from hidden patterns in nature rather...results can be scary, but they may also hold the key to paradise."

"The design universe revolves around a woman who loves Q-tips, Post-its, and The Twilight Zone."