Yuri Suzuki's MoMA
Inspiring Objects Designed for Everyone, From Arduino to a Soy Sauce Bottle
The MoMA's recently opened exhibition This Is For Everyone showcases some of the museum's most democratic designs. The Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, designed by Kenji Ekuan, is one example. Kikkoman
Kinematic's 4-D printed dress is a glimpse at how technology will impact how we construct the built world in the future. MoMA
The @ symbol, a true case of universal design. MoMA
Golan Levin's Universal Construction Kit provides 3-D printed adapters to connect proprietary toy kits like Lego, Duplo and Lincoln Logs. Studio For Creative Inquiry
The EyeWriter, democratizing the act of design by letting people with ALS draw with their eyes. MoMA
The Arudino board opens the world of "thinkering" to a much wider audience. MoMA
The Creative Commons symbol represents openness. MoMA
Marjan van Aubel and Jamie Shaw's Well Proven Stool uses timber waste shavings to create a bio-resin. MoMA
Technology Will Save Us' DIY Gamer Kit teaches people to code their own video games. MoMA
MIT's Makey Makey turns the world into touchpads. MoMA
All of these DIY technology kits like Yuri Suzuki's Ototo are a great example of enabling the average person to engage in the act of designing. MoMA
Paola Antonelli has a theory about designers. “I keep thinking that designers in the future will become almost like philosophers, you know?” she tells me as we wander through a third floor showroom at MoMA, where her most recent exhibition, This Is For Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good, just opened. The room is filled with objects—Bjork’s Biophilia tablet app, Kenji Ekuan’s famed Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, the “@” sign—that seem, at first glance, to have little in common beyond the fact Antonelli decided they should be there.
But if you ask Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, she’ll say the objects are in this showroom because they share two things she feels are inherent to the practice of good design. First, they need a purpose: “Designers are little bit like singers and actors,” she says. “They need an audience, otherwise they don’t know what to do with themselves.” Second, and more importantly, the pieces in the exhibition are for everyone.
MoMAThe idea that design is “for everyone” is complicated, if only because what does something being for everybody even mean? It can mean access. Is an object universally accessible regardless of economic and political circumstances? It can mean intention. Does the design add something positive to the world? It can mean the democratization of the act of designing itself, which speaks to Antonelli’s point about the designer as philosopher. Increasingly, design is less about a select group of people making aesthetic decisions on humanity’s behalf and more about presenting frameworks so everyone can play a role.
Of the dozens of pieces in the collection, certain are more obviously for everyone. Golan Levin’s Universal Construction Kit, for instance, provides 3-D printed adapters to connect proprietary toy kits like Lego, Duplo and Lincoln Logs. The “@” and Creative Commons symbols are clear examples of universal design, so too is Ekuan’s soy sauce bottle, which has retained the same design for more than 50 years. “I really get moved by something like the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle,” says Antonelli. “It sounds crazy but, it’s the truth.” Other projects, like the Makey Makey, Arduino and the Eyewriter show how technology can, for better or worse, enable just about anyone to design. Ecovative’s mycelium bricks and Kinematics 4-D printed dress point to designs that may one day have a huge impact on how we create our built world.
It’s clear that design, both the act of designing and the objects themselves, very well may be more accessible than ever, but it’s still not for everyone. Antonelli readily acknowledges this—see Design and Violence, an ongoing project that examines the ambiguous and sometimes nefarious relationship we have with certain design objects—though she’s quick to admit to a penchant for design altruism. That designers should take what she calls a “hippocratic oath,” isn’t a naive expectation, it’s just that despite good intentions, reality is always more complicated than platitudes allow room for.
As we finish the tour, we glance at the wall text that serves as an introduction to the exhibition. It reads: “Is design today, so often simply assumed to be for the greater good, truly for everyone?” Even among the blue-skied objects in the room, it’s a healthy dose of skepticism that Antonelli says she’s becoming increasingly more at peace with. “My whole career I’ve been a little idealist, thinking always of design as a force for good,” she says. “I’m tired of being so Pollyanna-ish about it.”
This Is For Everyone will be on view at MoMA until Jan. 1, 2016.