The suite of dynamic informational and interpretive media installations at the Museum of Arts and Design.
Our program of dynamic informational and interpretive media for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York has won a Bronze in the Environments category of the prestigious International Design Excellence Awards, announced today. The awards are co-sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), BusinessWeek, Target and Autodesk.
The IDSA jury recognized the project for its use of dynamic and interactive technologies in a museum environment. Designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team, the media were developed as an integral part of MAD’s new home at 2 Columbus Circle and include animated directory and wayfinding displays and interpretive installations that let visitors explore the museum’s permanent collection. The program was developed in conjunction with the identity we designed for the museum.
Abbott Miller’s exhibition design for the Harley-Davidson Museum was a Finalist in the Environments category of the awards.
Lisa Strausfeld has been selected as a finalist in the Interaction Design section of this year’s National Design Awards presented by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. This is the first year the awards have recognized interaction design as a category. Lisa’s co-nominees are Potion and Perceptive Pixel. The New York Times calls this year’s awards “the 10th annual incarnation of the design world’s Oscars.” Congratulations, Lisa!
The Number of Numbers site designed by Michael Gericke and his team is today’s recommendation from Very Short List: Science. “This clever, beautifully designed slide show and quiz…takes us through seven early tallying systems and poses a single, simple question on each page. How many moons orbit Mars? How many lives does a Felis catus have? The answers are right in front of you—but written in ancient numeral systems you must decode.”
1100 Architect, the New York and Frankfurt-based architecture firm founded by David Piscuskas and Juergen Riehm, is known for its warm yet minimal residential, commercial and institutional spaces such as the MoMA Design Store, the Deutsche Film Museum in Frankfurt and the Queens Central Library in Jamaica, New York. Capturing the discreet functionality of their work, Abbott Miller and his team recently designed a website for the firm that takes its inspiration from a long table blanketed with books that greets visitors as they enter the New York office.
After its success last year, One Laptop per Child is again extending its Give One Get One campaign where participants buy two XO laptops, one of which is donated to a child in a developing country and the other of which the donor can keep for themselves. In coordination with the program, OLPC has launched a redesigned website designed by Lisa Strausfeld and Christian Marc Schmidt. The new site is an evolution of the previous one and was designed to more actively engage visitors through videos, frequently updated news feeds, Flickr photostreams and interactive demonstrations of Sugar, the laptop’s user interface.
OLPC is also taking its marketing campaign and distribution system to a new level this year, making the laptops available through Amazon and partnering with media companies such as CBS and Time Warner as they donate TV time, billboard space and magazine pages to raise public awareness about the initiative. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Lab and chairman of OLPC, spoke to the New York Times yesterday about the new campaign and the laptop program, which he says is “unequivocally working.”
Pentagram has been involved with OLPC for several years now, with Michael Gericke having designed the organization’s identity and Strausfeld having developed Sugar as well as the previous incarnation of the website. Their work for the nonprofit has won several awards including a 2008 International Design Excellence Award and a prestigious INDEX: Award.
This past weekend Studio 360 aired a segment about the Detroit Institute of Arts‘ groundbreaking program to make its permanent collection more engaging to visitors, part of a larger museum expansion and reinstallation that opened last fall. Reporter Zak Rosen interviewed Lisa Strausfeld about her design of the museum’s interactive installations, including the immensely popular Art of Dining, and noted that a year after the renovation, attendance is up by 60 percent.
The 2008 International Design Excellence Awards were announced today and Sugar, the user interface designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for One Laptop per Child, won a Silver in the Interactive Product Experiences category, one of four awards that went to OLPC in this year’s competition.
The suite of interactive interpretive installations developed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for the Detroit Institute of Arts has received a Bronze Medal in the 2008 MUSE Awards. The 19th annual competition, sponsored by the American Association of Museums, recognizes outstanding achievement in museum media in acknowledgement of the role technology plays in enhancing the museum visitor experience. The judges reviewed the DIA installations as “captivating and diverse,” “a refreshing and unexpected experience for the art museum visitor,” and “an impressively diverse mix of experiences that are astutely matched by the museum to differing goals and visitor outcomes.”
The suite of interactive interpretive installations created by Pentagram for the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Founded in 1885, the Detroit Institute of Arts recently underwent an extensive six year, $158 million renovation that sought, among other things, to rethink the display of the museum’s permanent collection. As part of the renovation, Lisa Strausfeld and her team worked with the museum’s education and interpretation department to develop a suite of permanent media-based interactive exhibitions that would help make the collection more accessible through the use of technology.
Lisa Strausfeld will be a speaker at MIND08, the two-day symposium presented by Seed and the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the exhibition currently on view at MoMA. Curator Paola Antonelli will host presenters including Greg Lynn, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jessica Banks, Chuck Hoberman and Neri Oxman, among others. Thursday, 3 April and Friday, 4 April at MoMA and Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Tickets are free, but required for admission—register here.
