I was in New York last week and got a chance to see MoMA’s Talk to Me exhibit. I’d been following the development and curation of the show on its blog, which bravely linked to works that were being considered for inclusion. The show, on the communication between people and objects, featured a lot of projects that should be familiar to readers of this blog. It’s a fantastic collection of some of the best work…
 
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I’ve always thought serendipity is important — something that I’m not sure I’d normally even bother to mention. But a couple recent things have made me want to not only build more experiences that support increased serendipity, but find ways in get more of it in my life, too. Ethan Zuckerman’s CHI keynote “Desperately Seeking Serendipity” is so full of interesting ideas that I’m having trouble getting it out of my mind. He’s taken his…
 
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As museums struggle to find new ways to attract visitors and engage them, London’s Tate Modern has a pretty cool idea… use game-play to make museum-going more fun. How? With their iPhone app Tate Trumps. With the app, visitors: roam the gallery looking for artworks you think will score highly in one of three modes. In Battle mode, you need to ask yourself the question, “If this artwork came to life, how good would it…
 
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London’s Natural History Museum recently opened the interactive film “Who do you think you really are?” It’s the inaugural experience in their David Attenborough Studio lecture theater — a 64-seat theater where each seat has its own tablet computer. The 50-minute film teaches visitors about evolution using a mix of techniques. It looks like an interesting experience, using narrative storytelling, heads-down individual interactive segments, and heads-up/social augmented reality and image sharing. The project was a…
 
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Showing a little love for something local to LA, the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust opened recently and it’s got some nice interactive exhibits. The museum is a fairly small space and so interactive was required to allow visitors to as much content as possible. The experience may not be revolutionary, but it’s elegantly done. There are three interactive components: 1) the “World That Was” is an interactive table with images that float to…
 
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With the fashion for full Flash websites slowly fading into history (or is it just that websites load faster now?), I was excited to discover Pretty Loaded. Launched in January 2009, the site is an archive, or museum, of one of the artifacts of those big Flash sites… the preloader, or “loading” screen. Once upon a time, in a land of sputtering dial-up connections, websites took ages to load. Folks yearned for the 100% mark….
 
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From now through July 2011 you should make Talk to Me a regular part of your websurfing routine. The site is set up for an upcoming show at MoMA: Talk to Me is an exhibition on the communication between people and objects that will open at The Museum of Modern Art on July 24th 2011, and will feature design products and concepts from all over the world. It will feature a wide range of objects,…
 
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Small Design Firm‘s recent Pledge Wall for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a beautiful interactive installation with a unique pen interaction. David Small, the firm’s founder, is a friend back from when we were both students at the MIT Media Lab. I’m a little jealous, as his firm has gone on to create some remarkable projects, while my former firm, Triplecode, is in deep hybernation. But despite that I’m super-glad he was able to take…
 
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