Design Life Now: Curating the National Design Triennial

Every three years, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum presents an exhaustive, action-packed exhibition that looks at what’s been happening with design in the United States. I’ve been on the curatorial team since we launched the first Triennial in 2000. What’s it like to organize this exhibition? As the museum’s curator of contemporary design, my special interest is graphic design. But this is not a graphic design show. It’s an exhibition about the wider scope of the design world, and I work with a team of curators to fit graphics into that big, blurry picture.

While each Triennial is different, it is always a curated exhibition—not a competition. There is no entry form, and there is no formal submission process. A team of up to four curators looks around, sees what’s happening, thinks about the ideas that are flowing across disciplines and through the broader culture, and puts together a cohesive picture of the current design scene.

What are our criteria? We look for innovation and quality, and we also listen for the pulse—the life beat that’s drumming inside the design world and the larger society. We created a blog-style site to solicit this year’s nominations, and these suggestions served as an informal guide to our process. Around half a dozen designers nominated on the blog made it into “Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006,” featuring 87 designers and firms across the fields of architecture, fashion, products, graphics, furniture, theater, robotics, landscapes and beyond.

Each Triennial mixes up the disciplines. We don’t separate graphic design from, say, architecture and fashion. The curatorial team weaves together a show that is more like life, as opposed to the tidy departments of an art school or a trade magazine. In life, the work of different design fields collides in public, even though as individual producers, some designers stay focused on their own areas of expertise and are concerned above all with the work of their immediate peers.

This year Matter Practice Architecture and Tsang Seymour Design designed the installation, while Barbara Bloemink, Brooke Hodge, Matilda McQuaid and I—the curators—agreed collaboratively on the final list of designers. In a series of long, intense curatorial meetings, each of us brought ideas to the table and advocated for particular work. In the end, we conducted a blind vote and came to a consensus as to who would make the cut.

Although my particular focus is graphic design, I also nominated product designers, architects, and theater designers. Who did I pick, and why? Rick Valicenti, a designer’s designer, has been turning out amazing and ever-changing work for over 20 years. Trollbäck & Co. and PSYOP are individually putting type and image into motion, while Joshua Davis writes his own code to assemble passages of vector imagery into randomized landscapes. Chip Kidd wraps the interior life of literature inside a vivid, tactile surface. Planet Propaganda, heralding from Madison, Wisconsin, brings a fresh perspective to print, branding, and multimedia, while COMA, a design team working from both Brooklyn and Amsterdam, creates books and magazines that mix a cool European rationality with a pop culture beat.

I also wanted to recognize emerging design practices such as blogging and open source software, two phenomena that have taken off over the last four or five years. For instance, Speak Up, the online community created by Armin Vit in 2002, is a pioneering example of a new medium that makes design a place to go—a conversation, rather than a finished object. Likewise, Processing, created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas, is a software tool that comes alive through its use by designers and artists around the world.

Blogging and open source software reflect the do-it-yourself ethos that’s been changing everything from journalism and publishing to music, video and fashion. In an era of unstoppable self-education, citizens of every stripe want to get a grip on how things work and how to make or customize the stuff they use. ReadyMade and Make are two publications where graphic design and product design converge. The printed page becomes a medium for conveying new attitudes about housewares, décor and technology. Rather than focus on glamorous interiors or great things to buy, these guides offer resources that people can put to work immediately in their own lives.

Will these designers and practices still be considered significant in another three years? New social movements may already be sweeping aside today’s concerns. It’s our job as curators to keep listening. To date each of the three Triennials has captured a certain spirit of its time. The first one focused on technology; it opened in 2000, just as the tech bubble was about to burst. The second Triennial, which opened in 2003, reflected the inward turn of life after 9/11. The current Triennial sees people looking outward again as designers build and embrace social networks.

Reflecting this emphasis on community and the do-it-yourself process, in-house designer Bill Berry built the “Design Life Now” website, by far our best one yet. The new site uses tagging to show relationships among designers; for example, visit our typographic “cloud” to see the spread of ideas and locales and to find connections among designers from different disciplines. The site also features podcast interviews with over a dozen designers and a blog where you can talk to the curators. Come check out the site and tell us what you think. But don’t forget to visit the real museum, too, where so much is on view—so close you can almost touch it.

“Design Life Now” opened December 8, and is currently on view at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum through July 29, 2007.