Talk to Me: Design and communication between people and objects

Indo-American Arts Council is delighted to invite you A private tour of Talk to Me: Design and communication between people and objects With Curator Paola Antonelli October 25th, 2011 at 2 pm Museum of Modern Art, 53rd Street (bet 5th & 6th Ave), New York City

Suggested Donation: $25 Please rsvp pandit.shwetha@gmail.com Please send your cheque to: Indo-American Arts Council Indo-American Arts Council, 517East 87th St, Suite 1B, New York, NY 10128. About TALK TO ME: Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us. Tangible and intangible, and at all scales—from the spoon to the city, the government, and the Web, and from buildings to communities, social networks, systems, and artificial worlds—things communicate. They do not all speak up: some use text, diagrams, visual interfaces, or even scent and temperature: others just keep us company in eloquent silence. The purpose of design began to shift in the late 20th century from utility toward a more holistic combination of purpose and meaning. Thus far, 21st-century culture is centered on interaction: “I communicate, therefore I am” is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue. New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors. Talk to Me explores this new terrain, featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale. Designers are using the whole world to communicate, transforming it into a live stage for an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.
About Paola Antonelli: Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art Paola Antonelli is currently Senior Curator in The Department of Architecture and Design. She joined the Museum as Associate Curator in 1994, and was Curator from 2000 to 2007. Ms. Antonelli has organized a number of important and well-receivedexhibitions at MoMA, including Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (1995); Thresholds:Contemporary Design from the Netherlands (1996); Achille Castiglioni: Design! (1997-98); Projects 66: Campana/Ingo Maurer (1998); Open Ends and Matter (September 2000-February 2001); Workspheres (2001); Humble Masterpieces (2004); SAFE: Design Takes On Risk (2006); Digitally Mastered: Recent Acquisitions from the Museum's Collection (200607); Just In: Recent Acquisitions from the Collection (200708); Design and the Elastic Mind (2008); Rough Cut: Design Takes a Sharp Edge (200809); Ron Arad: No Discipline (2009); Action! Design over Time (2010); and Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design (2011). Ms. Antonelli has lectured worldwide in settings ranging from peer conferences to global interdisciplinary gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has served on several international architecture and design juries. From 1991 to 1993, she was a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has in the past few years also taught design history and theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts in New York. The recipient of a Master¹s degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1990, Ms. Antonelli is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London, and has received an Honorary Doctorate in Design from Kingston University, London. She also earned the Smithsonian Institution¹s National Design Award in October 2006, and in 2007, she was named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries by Time magazine. Ms. Antonelli is the author of many exhibition catalogues, including the ones for SAFE: Design Takes On Risk (2006) and Design and the Elastic Mind (2008), as well as Objects of Design (2003), a book dedicated to design objects in the Museum¹s collection, and the publication Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design (2005), which highlights how good design facilitates and enriches our daily life. She is working on Design Bites, a book on foods from all over the world appreciated as great examples of design.

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