‘Design for a Living World’ on View in Chicago

This summer Design for a Living World, the landmark exhibition presented by the Nature Conservancy and designed by Pentagram’s Abbott Miller, has traveled to the Field Museum in Chicago, where it remains on view through November 13.

Design for a Living World was co-curated by Miller and Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the show debuted in 2009. The exhibition commissioned 10 designers from the fields of fashion, product and industrial design to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials from a specific place where the Conservancy works. The participating designers include Yves Béhar, Stephen Burks, Hella Jongerius, Maya Lin, Christien Meindertsma, Isaac Mizrahi, Ted Muehling, Paulina Reyes from Kate Spade, Ezri Tarazi and Miller himself. Locations include endangered ecosystems in Australia, Micronesia, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Alaska, Idaho and Maine. The resulting designs demonstrate that by choosing sustainable materials, designers can actively contribute to the advancement of a global conservation ethic.

In addition to co-curating and participating in the exhibition, Miller and his team at Pentagram designed the exhibition and its companion book and website. The exhibition is designed to travel and the modular scheme originally installed at Cooper-Hewitt’s Carnegie Mansion in New York has been adapted for the Field Museum. The installation includes a new piece by Meindertsma inspired by the Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands in northern Illinois.

Design for a Living World is organized as a series of case studies about each designer, his or her assigned material and the environment where the material is sourced. The exhibition design documents the participating designers’ creative process and explorations as much as it promotes the results, capturing the sense of discovery—what it is like to work with a material you’ve never used before—and the generation of ideas for developing a useful object. Many of the designers traveled to the remote locations to work with their assigned materials, and the award-winning photojournalist Ami Vitale documented the sites for images featured in the show. (A concurrent exhibition of Vitale’s images from the project is on display at the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park.)

The exhibition design is itself a demonstration of sustainable production and materials. The fixtures have been conceived as a nomadic and modular system of platforms and vitrines. The cases are constructed of FSC-certified plywood from Bolivia, and the decks of the cases are made of Medite II, a fiberboard manufactured from 100 percent recycled wood fibers. Vitale’s images are printed on recycled aluminum panels and hung from pegs to create layered montages of images.

The exhibition next travels to the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix in January 2012.

Additional coverage: Time Out Chicago.