New Experience @ The Cooper Hewitt

This weekend I visited the Cooper Hewitt museum, a branch of the Smithsonian dedicated exclusively to design.

The museum takes the form of a contemporary design space set inside a gilded-age mansion originally built for Andrew Carnegie.

It was my first visit to the Cooper Hewitt since it underwent an extensive refurbishment several years ago.

The visitor experience feels extra-new, though the Georgian Revival building has been around for more than 100 years.

The combination of old-building and new-feel communicates the Cooper Hewitt’s remit well, because the collection covers both traditional and next-new design.

Behind the newness are a set of digital enhancements, collectively what the museum calls its New Experience.

These include immersive projection-media spaces, an interactive “pen" to help visitors remember favorites from exhibitions, and interactive table surfaces that allow them to try their own hands at design.

At the time of my visit, the immersion room upstairs was projecting large scale images from the museum’s wallpaper and textiles collection onto the walls. The upscaled projections enable viewers to see fine details in the patterns that might otherwise be difficult to appreciate by looking directly.

I used my interactive “pen” to tap and record a few favorites from the Design Triennial, which I checked-out later, online, when I got home.

One memorable installation was The Substitute, a super-realistic digital rendering of an extinct white rhino “brought back to life” using digital technology. (Pictured above.) The Substitute is wildly entertaining, but works on a deeper level, too, exploring concepts like species extinction and threats to biodiversity, artificial life forms, errors in AI-generated reproduction of nature, and so forth.

Despite all of the digital-interactivity, the Cooper Hewitt’s collection itself is mostly comprised of physical artifacts ranging from design sketches, to prototypes, to handmade and manufactured objects.

This anchoring is based on where the museum has been in the past few decades, and it will be interesting to see what new directions the collection takes. Will the collection drift towards being stored on the cloud and displayed in an AR headset? (I hope not, because part of the experience is sharing it with other people.)

According to the museum’s fact sheet, the Cooper Hewitt receives around 338,000 visits each year, has 210,000 artifacts in its collection, and runs on an annual budget of $20 million. It is the only Smithsonian Museum to charge an admission fee.

If you are a design-person but haven’t been to the Cooper Hewitt it is worth a visit. Here are some links where you can learn more.

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/factsheets/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum

https://www.cooperhewitt.org/new-experience/

https://dsrny.com/project/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum-1

https://www.pentagram.com/work/cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum-1