Safe Design

This week's Featured Friday Foto comes to you on Sunday.  Don't you just love surprises?

Those fuzzy looking plush things are stuffed toys.  Teddy bears?  No.  Microbes!  That's right, microbes, dangerous little buggers designed to teach kids about germs and illness.  They're part of the current design exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art entitled, "Safe: Design Takes On Risk."  The exhibition's curator, Paola Antonelli, writes:

No matter where or how we live, we all strive to be safe.  Safety is a very basic, urgent need, and although we cannot build an impenetrable guard against destiny and nature, we surround ourselves with defenses, from clothes to superstitions, objects to architectural details, information to blissful ignorance.  Design can do a lot to ease our anxiety, as shown by the examples collected here.   

The objects selected for this exhibition have been designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances; respond to situations of emergency; supply essential information; and provide a sense of comfort and security.  They have been selected because they display the ways in which skillful designers can come up with graceful solutions to high pressure predicaments.

I don't know about you, but I love the last line.  "Graceful solutions to high pressure predicaments" demonstrate clearly how designers live in the both/and of function and form.  As with the tension of risk/safety, designers continually strive to find the sweet spot that makes the solution a solution, and not itself a problem.  As this exhibition demonstrates, designers sometimes miss that sweet spot, sometimes ironically pointing up the ultimate futility of seeking safety in a mortal body.

If you're in New York between now and January 2, stop by MoMA to experience this provocative exhibition.

Tags: Design Museum of Modern Art

Comments

[Connie Sartain]

They're adorable.

[Tom]

And informative! Good form-function integration!