Is the iPod more essential than the paper clip? And is the venerable No. 2 pencil obsolete or worthy of a career award?
Ranking the champions of design can challenge the wisdom of the experts. So the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Smithsonian’s bastion of design scholarship, has decided to open the discussion to the public.
The New York museum has launched the People’s Design Award. The online contest at www.cooperhewitt.org parallels the National Design Awards, which the museum has conferred each fall since 2000. But unlike those honors, whose recipients are selected by a jury of peers in closed-door sessions, the online contest is intended to be a full-blown populist adventure.
No toothbrush is too humble to be considered, nor any sports car too luxurious for contention.
“Design is in the eye of the beholder,” the opening Web page reads, “so don’t be shy — tell us what you can’t live without.”
The museum is hoping for a “viral” explosion of ideas and debate with all the intensity the Internet can foster, says spokeswoman Jennifer Northrop. Anyone with an e-mail address can register and vote. And with a digital photo and a little Internet savvy, anyone can submit a nominee. (Comments are encouraged, and a Webmaster will monitor for appropriateness but exercise no other censorship, Northrop says.) The contest allows one vote per e-mail address, and votes can be changed at any time until the contest ends at 6 p.m. Oct. 16. The winning design will be announced at the National Design Awards gala Oct. 18.
Top contenders
At this writing, one of the top contenders is a $100 laptop. There isn’t one yet, but the initiative begun by Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT Media Laboratory — and announced last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — is progressing at a non-profit outfit called OLPC, for One Laptop Per Child. The goal, to provide technology to every child on the planet, is unassailable on humanitarian grounds. The only failing of the People’s Design Award site is that it doesn’t link to the OLPC site (www.laptop.org), where more about the project can be found.
Nominees from Chicago include the “Cloud Gate” bean sculpture and the Crown Fountain, both in Millennium Park.
Another top contender is Knoll’s iconic midcentury modern wire chair and Apple’s gorgeous transparent plastic iSub speaker, which has won countless awards for industrial design since 1999. Also leading the nominees is the Katrina Cottage, a likable yellow alternative to trailers designed by “new urbanist” architect Marianne Cusato. Another contender is the large-type prescription bottle designed by Deborah Adler and used at Target, which is sponsoring the People’s Design Award.
The Web site requires participants to register, so the museum can learn more about its audience. Voters are asked to provide their state of residence, ostensibly so nominations can be searchable by locale.
This year, director Paul Thompson initiated plans to enhance the museum’s Web site to open the Cooper-Hewitt’s vast collection — more than 250,000 objects and works of art — to people who can’t visit the museum’s Upper East Side headquarters. Thompson has talked enthusiastically of “an open theater for ideas” operating in tandem with curators and scholars.
“We’re trying to promote much greater awareness of the role of design in everyday life,” he said. “To make better consumers, it’s important to let them know they can have a say.”
The People’s Design Award is the most visible example of the new paradigm, but not the only one. The museum is also extending its national presence through an educational program, which will begin to offer materials to teachers over the Internet next month. The launch of this Educational Resource Center comes at the start of a “national design week,” Oct. 15-21, which seeks to encourage design-related activities across the country. The museum’s Web site will flash a national map of events — many of them scheduled coincidentally during the Cooper-Hewitt’s time frame but all contributing to the ad-hoc festival.
28 states participating
Participants in 28 states have signed on. The schedule includes a panel at Art Center College in Pasadena, Calif.; an Eames Film Festival in Birmingham, Mich.; a celebration of the architect Louis Sullivan in Chicago; the grand opening of the Denver Art Museum’s building by Daniel Libeskind; and an “Orange Peel-Off” design contest at a community arts center in Torrington, Conn.
The success of the People’s Design Award will depend on contributions from voters. Curators have put 50 images on the site, and the selection is quirky. Along with a see-through kayak, the latest World Cup soccer ball and an aluminum chair designed by architect Frank Gehry, there are objects from the upcoming National Design Triennial, which opens at the Cooper-Hewitt in December. Recently, Thompson added one of his favorites: the Maglite flashlight.
The range of exotica — architecture, fashion, industrial design, robotics — is suggestive of the open-ended call for nominations. If there’s any risk, it’s that the contest will lead to 10,000 nominations of personal favorites, each one attracting one vote.
“We want quality, rather than quantity,” Thompson said. “What we really want to see is a public forum and debate.”
