MoMA, & City Tickets NYC

I’m hugely excited and honored that two of my projects have been selected for inclusion in Talk to Me, the forthcoming exhibition at MoMA, New York. That’s not a sentence I thought I’d be writing any time soon!

My visualisation of household power consumption, and a specially adapted New York version of my thesis project, City Tickets, will be on show in the Special Exhibitions Gallery at MoMA, between 24th July and November.

Concerned with the communication between people and objects, the exhibit is based on the premise that contemporary objects contain information that goes well beyond their immediate use or appearance, and explores how designers write the script on which that dialogue is built.

Although the curators originally selected my thesis project as it was completed in Copenhagen for inclusion in the catalogue and exhibition, we decided that a New York version of the project would make more sense to an audience in New York, and be a more powerful addition to the show. Just as the Copenhagen version was based on the standard pay and display ticket machines on the streets in that city, so the New York version took the existing Muni Meters as a starting point.

Showing off this new version of my project is a new set of images, high resolution versions of which can be found on flickr, and some of them are shown below. The project is fundamentally the same as the original, a description of which can be read here, although many tweaks (visual, and deeper) have been made to the project for this second run.

[above: Muni-meter with both parking receipts and City Tickets available]

[above: Muni-meter with adapted instructions and interface]

[above: detail adapted instructions and interface; same image]

[above: a City Ticket being filled in with a non-urgent problem]

[above, left to right: a City Ticket; the hyperlocal map on the reverse; a City Ticket to-do list]

Thanks to Adam for giving me the time and freedom it’s taken to re-think and re-make this project over the last couple of months, and thank you to my wonderful thesis advisor at CIID, Gitte, for all her help in creating the original version on which this is based. And thank you, of course, to Paola Antonelli (senior curator), and Kate Carmody (curatorial assistant) at the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, for selecting my projects, and being so encouraging of the idea to specially adapt City Tickets to the context of New York for the exhibition.

Not new, but also selected for Talk to Me is my visualisation of power consumption in a household (with data from a smart energy meter), plotted over 24 hour periods. I took some satisfaction from opening the file to see where it could be polished, tweaked, or improved in some way, and ultimately sending it unchanged, exactly as I had left it after our computational design course at CIID, at the tail end of 2009.

 

Also deserving of congratulations are the lovely Jacek, Jennifer, and Martina, for having their project Sidetrack selected for the same exhibition.

Several visiting faculty and lecturers at CIID also have work in the show, including Shawn Allen/Stamen, Timo Arnall/Touch (now BERG), Durrell Bishop/Luckybite, Golan Levin, Jack Schulze/BERG, and Nicholas Zambetti/IDEO (now Apple). Their (and our!) work joins an eclectic collection of artifacts and interfaces from the late 60s to examples of contemporary design, from the functional to the fanciful.

CIID projects at MoMA, and in truly amazing company – happy days. Simona and all the faculty in Copenhagen and beyond deserve a huge amount of credit for that.

I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibition in July, and hope to see you there.