Exhibit of the week: Why Design Now?

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

New York, through Jan. 9, 2011

Unlike most design exhibitions, this one doesn’t feature objects intended to make your life more elegantly cutting-edge, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Instead, the designers featured in the latest edition of the National Design Museum’s Triennial are primarily concerned with how to “deliver the maximum social good to the maximum number of people.” One of the largest shows ever to be dedicated to socially conscious design, it’s filled with scores of inventive prototypes, pieces of furniture, and blueprints for innovative buildings. In most, form decidedly follows function—though “some of the functions are pretty esoteric.” There’s body armor for use during mine-clearing missions. There’s a bicycle-powered grain thresher, currently used in Mali. There’s an “LED light bulb fueled by dirt.” One fully recyclable (if somewhat zany) furniture entry, the Cabbage Chair, is just an enormous, tightly wadded roll of paper.

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My nominee for “best in show” is Greg Holdsworth’s hilarious Return to Sender Artisan Eco-Casket, said David D’Arcy in The Architect’s Newspaper. An “elegantly minimal vessel” made of plywood and containing a wool mattress, it’s far less wasteful than the needlessly extravagant, slow-to-decay caskets commonly used today. Unfortunately, too few designers here share Holdsworth’s sense of humor: Their hearts may be in the right place, but a dour earnestness often makes this exhibition seem like a “Boy Scout march.” Too many entries also seem slapdash, hurried—in other words, ugly. “Who cares about sculptural harmony if you have a planet to save?”

Actually, I wish these objects were uglier—or at least took more risks, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. Socially conscious design, after all, is supposed to make people stop and think. Here we encounter energy-saving extension cords and “high-style chairs molded out of eco-friendly flax.” But they still look just like any other extension cord or high-style chair. “Barely a single designer seems to realize that for an object to make a real difference, it needs to have symbolic as well as practical force.” Fortunately, at least one does: Dutch designer Jetske de Groot creates chairs from scraps of other chairs—“a chromed bottom with a turned-wood top,” for instance. She doesn’t hide the “mix-and-match” nature of her designs, but celebrates it. “It’s a new aesthetic that talks, as loudly as possible, about the need to reduce, reuse, and recycle.”