 Thank you, Christina. Thank you. And grazie mille, Christina, although I have to say you're Roman. I'm Milanese, so. Nobody's perfect. Nobody's perfect, exactly. It's really a pleasure to be here with you and to be here with a sympathetic audience that already knows the design is so much more than chairs. Kind of got fed up with chairs a long time ago. And it's been my pleasure and my mission to expand the idea of design for the MoMA audience, which is a very international audience, and for my peeps like you, my peeps. And to make everybody understand that design really is an endeavor that encompasses so much more than just physical objects. But of course, you already know that. On the other hand, when I got to MoMA in 94, almost 18 years ago, I realized that coming from Italy, where design is much more taken as normal, I had to really work a lot to make people understand in the United States what design is. And it's interesting because that really has to do also with the idea of what's next. You know, the geography of design and how different countries and different communities perceive the idea of design. You know, in Italy, Italy used to really know what design was, but unfortunately, it remains stuck in this idea of chairs and furniture. And elsewhere instead, where minds are nimbler and where education systems are a little rougher and maybe have to really fight for themselves and fend off for themselves, instead, design is much more up-to-date. And that's really what I would like to discuss with you today throughout the presentation. I mean, during the presentation, I will talk about what I know, which is not truly my work, but just the examples of the exhibitions that I've done that express this kind of effort in pushing the idea of design further. But I would like you to really pay attention to where things come from and where they're going. Because today, design is not anymore best in Italy or best in England or best in Japan. It truly is expanded all over the world, made free and set free by the fact that we're not tethered anymore as designers to industries and to production plants, but that instead we can really leap off in the virtual world or in the liminal world. Why call it virtual? It's the real world for us, in the liminal world. And truly what makes for centers of gravity in the new geography of design today are schools. So with this kind of lens, I would like to tell you a little bit more about what it entailed at the Museum of Modern Art to push this idea of design a little further. Now, it's a real luck to work at MoMA because you have truly a stage. There are many people, many colleagues around the world that are doing fantastic work and you might not know about them just because I'm at MoMA and they are maybe in a museum in Frankfurt which is definitely a polar center of the world but not as much as New York. So my first luck was to be able to stand on that stage, a stage that gives you visibility and also authority. So the second really important point with working at MoMA is the idea of the power that you get to actually push ideas and designers and thinkers forward. So with that in mind, one of the first shows that we did was about materials. This is 95, so a long time ago, but already at that time materials were becoming much more about software than about hardware. I mean, it used to be 20 years ago, 25, 30 years ago, that in order to produce a prototype of a plastic chair, you had to invest $50,000 or something similar to get a mold made in either steel or aluminum and push at high temperatures, lurry of plastic pellets and actually have something come out on the other side, which was not perfect yet. You had to kind of shave it off and polish it. And instead, already in 95, but even more so today, new technology in materials enables us to produce with resins, you know, catalyzers and resins at ambient temperature prototypes that are already viable, not to mention 3D printing, not to mention the simulations that you can do on the computer. In other words, the power to design materials is in the hands of designers today. They don't have any more to rely on chemists and engineers. So this kind of flexibility was a way to once again use beautiful objects because you still need to have the eye candy and the attractive magnet of beauty in order to push ideas sometimes, but with that particular kind of slant. And that exhibition was followed by others, but I would like to point out to you just a few. Another exhibition that I'm particularly proud of that once again talked about the connection that design has to real life was work spheres. Work spheres was in 2001, but of course the design of the show itself, the curation started before, and it started during the period of the dot-com boom. When people, because of a difference in age, in the age of the workforce, started experimenting with new modes of working that were much more socially based, you know, you can imagine what that implies in the design of an office coming out of a generation of cubicles that used to be revolutionary in the 50s when they were invented and then they became suffocating. So this whole exhibition was about a change, not in style, not in lifestyle, but rather in behaviors that had a very strong impact in the way we live, and that had to do with design. So the second point was design is about life, and designers are the ones that enable us to actually use whatever innovation, whatever progress is available to us in the most fulfilling way. Then came Safe. Safe design takes on risk. That was an exhibition that happened whose design, whose curation started in 1999 and 2000. And at that time it was called Emergency, and it was all about emergency equipment. It was all about fire department equipment. It was all about triage centers. It was all about emergency stuff that became so visible and so present on 9-11 that I freaked out and canceled the show. It was very interesting to see how a show that was even more imbibed in life became imbibed in tragic events of life, and it was therefore canceled, but then reprised years later by looking at the other side of the metal. I mean, if you think about it, emergency is reaction. Safety is pro-action, and that's what design does most of the time. I mean, I like to say that designers almost take a Hippocratic oath like doctors. And whatever they do, even when they highlight dystopian aspects of the future or of life, is always with this idea of pushing people in the right direction. So looking at safety was about looking at the glass that was half full as opposed to half empty when you talk about emergency. But it was an exhibition that once again pushed design down from the realm of art or up from the realm of decoration and purification into real life, which is what truly matters to us here and to us everywhere. Design and the Elastic Mind happened in 2008, and that was an exhibition that enabled me to add an important piece to the puzzle that I'm telling you about, which is the puzzle, the piece about innovation. Design and the Elastic Mind was about design and science, and it was truly an experiment. I mean, until two days, maybe one day, before the opening of the show I could not sleep at night because I thought it would be a total flop because it was about designers and scientists thrown together and the idea that if technology had always been this membrane that's set in between designers and scientists, instead that membrane was not necessary anymore. So I thought it would be just a floppy experiment. And instead, well, you know, the truth is people are very generous and audiences are generous, so they filled in the gaps that were missing and the exhibition became not only a big success but also a great learning experience for me. But what was important about Design and the Elastic Mind was that it helped me position designers in a way that I think I will use even more in the future. Designers, in reality, are the catalysts of progress. I mean, we heard a lot too much about innovation and we know about disruptive innovation. Of course, disruptive innovation is when something is too new and you don't know how to deal with it yet and it makes you anguished and at least uneasy or at least feeling a malaise. What designers do is they take revolutions that happen maybe in science and technology or in politics and they transform them into objects that you and I can use, that you and I can feel some familiarity or at least some curiosity about so we can be drawn in and we can start a new life and a new behavior with them. And this idea of designers as the interface, truly, of progress between progress and humanity is what I try to stay with even today with this new show, Talk to Me, and with whatever I research, I enterprise. So I would like now to tell you a little bit about Talk to Me, which is the exhibition that, as Christina said, is open right now, which is under titled Design and the Communication Between People and Objects. Now, it's really great because the three currents in this exhibition, in this particular conference, kind of follow a little bit, Design and the Elastic Mind and Talk to Me. If you think about it, who's next? I'm gonna say what's next and who's next in a way come together. And then we're gonna talk about creation and design is definitely about creation. And then man and machine, and in truth, this is a little bit what Talk to Me is about. It's not only about man and machine, it's about humans and objects in general. I mean, if you think about it, things have always spoken to us throughout the centuries. I mean, literature is chock-a-full of pregnant objects that became catalysts for so much memory and understanding from the Madeleine to my personal inspiration, which is a pretty bad poem by Guido Gozzano. Guido Gozzano is a B or C class poet from the beginning of the 20th century in Italy, and this is kind of a clumsy poem, but I loved it so much for some weird reason. It's called Grandma Hopes, Grandma Speranza's Friend, and at some point it talks about the little things of awful taste that Grandma Speranza had in her room. And it goes through all these different objects that are all like, you know, I just found my Pippi Longstocking doll from when I was five and I was like, yeah, what's this? But so these things that are nothing special taken as absolutes but that, relatively to you, are incredibly meaningful. So it's something that is as old as mankind, but what I particularly like are design feats that marry very ancient human rituals and behaviors with the most advanced technology, and that's in a way what this exhibition is about. It's about how design is helping us keep our humanity with any kind of technology that is available to us. So it's a very optimistic show in a way, or at least it tries to highlight good examples. I mean, we all work in this particular field so we know how much crap is around, but that's always the case, right? And our job is to kind of sift through the crap, our job as curators to sift through the crap or the white noise or the fertile humus that will help things blossom in the future and present the best case studies to the world. The exhibition is organized by, of course, who's talking to you. You know, and objects are the first examples. You go by scale a little bit. And this particular object is by Casey Kinzer. I'll tell you pretty much where people come from so you'll keep that in mind. We did at NYU the Interactive Telecommunications Program. She's out of Kansas. And she designed this little robot that is very simple. I mean, it's a robot because it moves, but it's made of cardboard. It has a smiley face and it has a little engine and wheels and a flag that says, please help me cross, say, Washington Square. And Casey hid a camera in her bag and saw what people were doing. And you should see, well, New Yorkers, when they see something small and looking for directions, they go crazy. We know that. But this particular robot, which is now also doing missions across MoMA, going from the lobby up to the galleries, is really, I mean, cuddled and really treated by human beings as if it were like a very fragile little pet. And it's interesting because it takes into account so many different theories from the uncanny valley to everything else. But the truth is that we have an instinctive relationship with objects. And the fact that objects have talked to us for centuries is made even more explicit and clear by technology today or lack thereof. Another example case study, dowsing rod, you know, for centuries it existed, but today instead of looking for water, it looks for Wi-Fi. And this quite gorgeous example by James Chambers, and this is from the Royal College of Art in London, one of my favorite schools, which is the Design Interactions Program. It's a fantastic, fantastic program. James Chambers created a fictional design research group called the Atemboro Design Group. And of course it's named after Sir Richard, you know, the great anthropologist, zoologist, biologist, intellectual, you name it. And it's a group that studies what objects would do if they were given animal instincts. So you see here, let me use the laser because I have it. You see here a little computer that raises itself on its feet if you spill coffee on the desk. And here you see a radio that sneezes, a transistor radio that sneezes to free itself from dust. And this particular school, the Royal College of Art, attracts people from all over the world and it's become one of the most important places for the shape the design will take in the future, this particular program. And I'll talk about it a little more later. I'm talking to you is where people communicate with each other by means of objects and by means of technology, so it's the place for social networks too. But there's not too much about social networks in the exhibition. Social networks are taken as subjects, not as actors in the design progress, because let's face it, the design quotient of social networks is pretty gripped right now. Let's hope it gets better. But there are so many different examples of great objects that are used to make people communicate. And of course, I think that most of you are already familiar with the Eye Writer Project. I always hail it as a great example because the Eye Writer Project shows what great talent, great generosity, a good use of open source, moral and philosophy can do for the world. Right now they can do it for one paralyzed graffiti artist, but they can really move on to spread across the world. There's a group introduction about the Eye Writer Project. It's a group of hackers that is, you know, Zac Lieberman, James Powderly, I mean, many different people, even Roth, many of you might know some of them. Most of them come out of the Eye Beam, which is another interesting atelier workshop in New York. And they helped graffiti artist, Tempt 1 in Los Angeles, who was completely paralyzed because of Lou Gehrig disease, tagged again a building in downtown LA by using a technology that they developed a few years ago, which is the laser tag technology, which enables you to tag buildings and other landmarks with laser. It's a temporary tag, but it still has the kind of guerrilla feeling, so every time they show up anywhere, the police come, even though there's nothing invasive about the whole technology. But so, by using very simple eye glasses, a computer camera, the software they developed, Tempt 1 was able from his bed in the hospital using his pupils to tag a building in downtown LA and see it on the screen in real time with an emotion that we can only imagine because he could not express it except for very rapid eye movements. But this particular project really cuts down to the heart of the issue. And you have to remember, my audience at MOMA is, of course, made of people like you. I always feel that I have to give something to the community that has given me so much. But it's also made of a really, really wide audience that comes to MOMA to see Matisse and Picasso to take the vitamins of art, and then they stumble upon a design show and I want to keep them there. And, of course, the most receptive part of my audience are kids, and they immediately get it. But in some cases, universal messages like this are extremely powerful for the wide audience. An example that is facetious, but at the same time very serious, is Echromy by Daisy Ginsburg and James King. Also RCA, also Design Interactions, but now everywhere. And Daisy in particular has set up a whole movement, a whole consortium of universities across the world that work on the field of synthetic biology coupled with design. As a matter of fact, this Echromy is an example of designers working with synthetic biologists by tweaking bacteria. In this case, it's the very common E. coli that we all carry in our guts. They get tweaked, engineered, and redesigned so that they react to different chemicals in our guts that correspond to different pathologies. And therefore, taken as a shake, they become diagnostic tools in our guts and they actually give out their signals through our stool. So our poo becomes the diagnostic tool. And this particular project won the iGEM, the jamboree that is at MIT every year that is about genetically engineered machinery. And of course, it's quite beautiful in the exhibition. It's shown in this perfect briefcase with all the different samples of stools that of course are not real. But it gives you another example of what designers can do and it's very far from cute chairs, as you can imagine. Social interaction. There are various examples of actually physical world interaction with technology that enables you to actually overcome some of your, of course, problems. Everybody has a problem with his or her own body. And Adi Maram is very small, so she created this extensible platforms that are actually commanded by an app on her iPhone. And of course, there were a few games, a few social games like tentacles. I don't know how many of you have played this game. But the video game field presents so many great examples of real art and great design, and this was a particularly effective one. Life talks to you. So does your family. So does your home. So there is a very lively communication going on with your own life. It's biometrics. It's about recording everything that you do. And Nicholas Felton is a very famous example. Nicholas Felton puts out every year the Feltron report. He added an R to his last name because it sounds much more corporate and kind of, you know, a little bit off, you know, a little spy, little spooks like. And he records everything that he does, you know, where he eats, how many times he has sex, what he drinks, et cetera, et cetera. And every year he puts out an annual report that is at the same time mocking but also beautifying the whole idea. And it's quite beautiful. Life talking to you is, of course, represented also by passage. Many of you might know this game by Jason Rohrer. I love it. And it's in the exhibition and people can play it. It's a game where you go in five minutes from birth to death. You go through life. You see over there, you have your little grave, you know, over there. And you have choices, right? You can decide whether to take a partner or not. If you take a partner, life is easier, but it ends sooner. If you don't take a partner, you live longer, but it's a little tougher. You have obstacles and choices to make, and so on and so forth. So it's a very philosophical game and one that definitely makes you think more than one would hope to. And PIG-05049 is also a great example of an incredibly thoughtful project that marries really old technology with new ideas about the afterlife of people and of animals. PIG-05049 is the name of a pig that designer, Christian Mindertzma, chose in a factory in an industrial farm in the Netherlands. And after it was slaughtered, she followed the pig everywhere to find out all the products that were made out of that pig. And you realize how impossible it is truly to keep kosher or halal in the world because pieces of pigs are everywhere, from Crayola crayons to the glaze of ceramics, to even cigarettes, because the hemoglobin of the pig is used in the filter. So there's like fragments of this pig everywhere. And it's really interesting because all of a sudden you realize so much more about the world by looking at just one particular individual object. One part of the exhibition that I'm really proud of is the part that enables you to talk with God. So it's about technology helping you talk with God, halal, or whichever, yeah, jar, astafari, I mean whichever you decide to talk with. This is an object that is actually used by cloistered nuns in Northern England. And it's a ticker tape that draws from Google News and from We Feel Fine. I don't know if you know the Jonathan Harris and Seb Camvar website that is really about taking very intimate iterations of the root feel on the internet. So you have both the macro, Google News and the micro in We Feel Fine, and it gives these nuns some topics to pray about. Because you know they're quite isolated, they're really isolated, they only get Vatican newspapers and we know how they don't have really news. So by using the sticker tape they can pray for, you know, little brigitte in Hamburg who's down one day because it rains, or they can pray that Gaddafi does not hurt anybody else and leaves without creating too much trouble. So the same happens also in other religions. And this is a great example for Muslims. It's a prayer mat that lights up, it has a compass module, so it lights up when you're really in the direction of Mecca. Just in case you're a little disorientated. And it was created by Sonar Ozenk who is a Turkish designer living in London. The city of course talks to you. This is probably one of the examples of interaction fields that are most explored and I'm sure that many of you here work in it a lot. And the design response is at all different scales and I don't know how many of you are familiar with Polk. It's a company in London and Baker Tweet is a Twitter device that is set at the Albion Bakery in East London. It's kind of sturdy because it has to be handled by, you know, bakers when they might have flour on their hands and so on and so forth. But basically it sends its subscribers tweets that let it be known that the croissant are coming out of the oven. Now if you think about it, it's what I used to do. We used to go out until the wee hours in the morning and then we would go sniffing around Milan to find out which bakery was having bread delivered, you know, and right now you can get a tweet which is much easier. Then we get to the scale of the building and this is an example of a building that is a QR tag. You know, the big facade is a QR tag. Now I think the QR tags will become nostalgia in about two years, you know, when GPS technology will be finer and when we'll be able to have shape recognition that is also finer, we will not need them anymore. But right now they are used a lot and also in the exhibition they're used, I'll show you how, but this particular building delivers messages that are in a shopping district so it's about sales and particular events that are happening inside. The exhibition shows also very low tech, maybe enabled by new technology but still very old fashioned and this is a map of Berlin created by artist Cecil Tolas who used headspace technology. Headspace technology is used in the perfume industry. It was developed in the 60s to capture the scent of a live flower without killing it. It almost looks like old acupuncture, Chinese acupuncture cuppings and it really captures the aroma without killing whatever is in front of it and Cecil used it for Berlin and she created a whole map with West-South, Berlin and so on and so forth and in the exhibition we have this sense that, you know, I mean they're not Gardenia but they're not even Chinatown in New York in the summer so not so bad, I mean really I'm sure that those of you who are from Berlin would get a real jolt out of recognizing that particular scent. Locals and tourists is a series of maps from all over the world there's about 125 cities where by drawing pictures from Picasso and Flickr the designer was able to detect which zones are more for tourists and which zones are more for locals. Of course the locals are the ones that will take pictures more all over the city and through a longer period of, over a longer period of time. So it kind of gives you a snapshot of where you want to go if you're a local and where tourists usually go. It's one more way to read the city. Then there are worlds that talk to you and that you talk and converse with and worlds that come in many different flavors. I mean this is a quite beautiful project by Chris Wolken and Kenichi Okada animal superpowers. It was developed between Tokyo and London and New York and it's a series of objects that enable children to feel like an ant. So you see that red helmet. It has a camera inside. No, the camera is in the gloves and you have a screen in front of you and the gloves magnify objects 10 times. So you see the grass really big and instead the yellow one is to make you feel like a giraffe. It's like a periscope. You don't get to be a giraffe and you feel a little bit like it. And then instead another way to look to the world is much more serious and much more about real life. Once again it's BBC Dimensions that was developed by Berg London. BBC Dimensions is one of my favorite projects in the show. I actually like them all but this one enables you to take events that happened elsewhere in the world like the oil spill in the Gulf or the floods in Afghanistan and superimpose them onto your home turf. All of a sudden you realize how big something really was because you can feel it in your gut and you realize that the walk and the Apollo 11 moon landing was a walk around the block. It was pretty ridiculous, frankly, but it's interesting and instead you realize that the floods were in the Gulf spill were so big. I find it amazing when we use technology to really get a stronger sense of reality. It's very good use. So what you've seen so far is really an expression of that and other objects in the show, other examples in the show range from Ushahidi which is the service that enables citizen journalists to actually map in real time with any kind of telecommunication, areas of danger. There are many other examples that are about reality because it's also very important in an exhibition to give something sweet and light and then something very deep and serious at the same time. So people have this modulation to really perceive things at a deeper level. They ruled by Josh On is a website that in my opinion was one of the first truly political uses of the Internet ever. It was in 2004 and it hasn't really been updated, I mean yes, but not so effectively ever since, but it showed all the collusions and the connections between corporate boards and governmental organizations in the United States in 2004. It was quite amazing to see how the connection between politicians and corporations went well beyond lobbying and was truly, you know, incestuous in a way. And it had never been used that way before. So visualization design has become, of course, a very important political tool but it also has become more and more refined. And you know also these exhibitions enable one to go through many different forms of design. Let's remember it's still our world and the QR tags are lovely and they can also be perceived as land art, like old astake or runes from Celtic regions. And this is actually a QR tag that is moaning a lawn in Turinja, which I find really quite beautiful. Of course, anytime you do a show and you categorize things, you always end up having a miscellaneous category. I mean you always end up with things that don't fit anywhere. But when I started doing this particular exhibition and realized there were so many things that didn't fit, I realized that I missed a category for real, which is the double and thunder category. I mean whenever there's communication there is miscommunication, there is like mistakes. But these mistakes can become actually very good pretexts for a new form of understanding. And in particular I realized that one of the most important pools in our lives today is curiosity towards others. You know the people that we considered others of any kind, whether it's gender, whether it's age, whether it's skin, whether it's way of life, whether it's sexual orientation, and so many people in the world of design and art and technology are working towards understanding others. I find that one of the most moving parts of the exhibition and of what I've found in the whole world of design. This is Putniko. I love Putniko. She's Japanese. In Japan she's a pop star. And in England instead she's a designer. So it was very funny because she was followed by Vogue Japan when she came to the opening of the show, and it's her here in the show next to her objects. And the people from Vogue Japan were saying, is she a designer? I'm like, yes she is. But what she does is she does really far-fetched and very strong objects that are usually accompanied by artwork and also by a music video. So it's like a full-fledged 360-degree expression of what she means. And she needs that because she has pretty important concepts to communicate. One of my favorite pieces in the show is her menstruation machine. You can see it really small here. It's fabulous. It almost looks like a chastity belt. And it enables people that cannot have their period to feel what it means to really have it. So it's for men, children. It has electrodes that make you have cramps. And it has a reservoir with something that comes under here and you're supposed to take your blood, fill the reservoir, and then you wear your sanitary pad and everything else. And I find it, it's been very polarizing. I mean, some people have gotten really offended by New York and some others instead, myself included, find it one of the most poetic gestures ever. Because you know, wouldn't it be fantastic if there were stations, menstruation machine stations. A man for once in his lifetime can go and really feel it. I think it's one of the most beautiful actions that can be for a real understanding of otherness. Because it's one of the last taboos. So I really, really love that particular piece. I mean, what I was showing here was her crowbar Jenny, because I realized that I didn't bring with me the menstruation machine image, but you might want to go and look for it, because it's quite beautiful. And there's also a little video in which we have a guy, and he's a guy, he's a guy, of course, but you cannot really tell it's a guy. He goes, struts around town with his girlfriend wearing it, and it's like a really nice pop song. It says, you know, does it hurt, huh? It hurts, and it's going to hurt more. So this is understanding others in all so kind of repulsive animals or considered by most repulsive animals. This is the work of a bat billboard that is supposed to make people in New York understand the bats are good. So it's a big billboard that works as habitat for the bats. You know, they can all hang upside down behind it. But also by working with bat experts that think they can understand a little bit about the sounds the bats make, it also kind of broadcasts what they're doing during the day. Sometimes in whimsical ways, like, I really like her ears, and other times when she's getting off her snack, we're going to sleep. So it's this idea of using technology to highlight things that we didn't know before, different worlds, and to understand others also when they are animals. Now, mind you, every single project that you've seen here is usually coming from a team of experts. So the menstruation machine was done together with the doctor. Croba Jenny, the other project by Sputniko with Cro experts. And in the case of Natalie and Chris, we've worked with scientists as well. So what I like particularly about what designers do today is that they are always well rounded and ready to answer any questions. And I think that's very important, and that's what differentiates them from artists sometimes. Artists have a lot of artistic license that supports them and floats them. And instead, designers need to be really ready to justify whatever they do. A Rubik's Cube from the Blind, very simply taking the name of the collar and putting them in braille so even blind people can play with it. A lot of objects for disabled people are part of this double and thunder section, because that's also one of the last barriers. So it's about breaking barriers. And in this particular case, this object that I love so much is a typographic book in which hyperlinks are represented as real red threads. A reminder of what things truly are. Also, these beautiful transformers that are kanji characters that correspond to animals' name that transform into the animal shape. So this idea of bringing together the physical, the virtual, and understanding, and transforming, and translating, and being liquid, which is what Amber also speaks about. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I always like that kind of mutant liquid terminator too. Feeling of being able to actually make yourself really small so that you can enter another dimension is what the whole exhibition is about. And it's also about communication. So since the very beginning, we were keeping a blog in which we showed, when I say very beginning, I'm talking about a year and a half ago, we showed what we were looking at. Everything that we were looking at was listed in the queue and we showed our tribulations as curators like, oh, this taxonomy doesn't work. We have to change it. And we were showing ideas about the installation. The problem, the big challenge with a show like this is how do you house 80 screens of different sizes and not make it look like a trade fair or a game arcade. And at the beginning we were looking at Soviet bastops made of concrete and we were looking at mini-golfs and then in the end we ended up with a different idea. The graphics of the exhibition, this old-fashioned idea of pixelation, it's old-fashioned. Well, because it's one of the first and more playful way to make the wide audience think of technology, of digital technology. So you always have to play on the edge of being scholarly and really talking about the subject in depth and also finding ways that are almost infotainment and edutainment ways to deliver your message because if you remain too cryptic or too serious you're not going to get there. And in the exhibition, as I mentioned to you, we used QR tags a lot and also in the catalogue. In the catalogue, the QR tags link you directly to the video so they don't go to a website that goes straight to the video which is housed in the website. And instead, in the exhibition, they are there as bookmarks so they take you to the website you can bookmark objects to see later if the exhibition is too crowded you can actually shoot the bookmark and bring it with you. So there's a good use of QR tags not because we wanted to aestheticize them but just because that's what's available right now and a good use of the blog to divulge what we were doing but also to keep us on our feet. So there was a lot of crowdsourcing I mean Juan later on will talk about he was talking yesterday about what do you call it social curation and I'm like I'm believing that. You know so there's a it's very interesting but I certainly do believe in feedback and in keeping it open and getting a better understanding of how different people feel about things and this brings us to the idea of geography that I think is so important. In this exhibition and in Designing the Elastic Mind the nations represented, I mean I never counted them but they really comprised so much of the globe. Not enough but a lot certainly and I feel that even more so in the future we will see design and art and technology spreading everywhere. What I think is important is to keep the idea of the validity of centers of gravity well in mind. Quality is what will lead us in the future. I mean so many people think there's an overwhelming amount of examples and it's true but at the same time there's also a natural selection of the species that happens and that is guided by quality of course and also by need and only by understanding needs of other nations and needs of other markets you know some people call them markets, other people call them instead audiences. Only by understanding needs from elsewhere will we be able to really keep up and do our job which is to push things slightly further and to once again as designers I consider you all designers be able to be the interface between real progress and the need to be very full and very generous human beings. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. What a wonderful introduction and in-depth presentation of what design can be. Probably most of you here know more about this than I do but I must say for me it was an eye opener. We're almost ready for questions and answers from the audience but I'm going to take the opportunity and start I just want to make sure that there are microphones out there so that I'll ask a question or two and then it will be your turn. I wanted to ask you because you're talking about who's next and you mentioned that there are people from all over the world but is there any particular area of the world that you see that things are happening a lot that you find particularly interesting? Who's next is everybody and that's what I'm always trying to make people understand in the States. I feel that Americans still have a strange complex of inferiority towards Europe when it comes to design and to because they think it's style and the thing is it's aesthetic so they still think that it's not for them but number one it is for them because design is for the people and number two the complex of inferiority should not really be towards Europe but it should be more towards the BRIC countries maybe which are the ones that in my opinion are best equipped to deal with the needs for sustainability of the future but this is a big discussion about what's the next audience in terms of who's next as designers once again I feel that while once upon a time design was where the industry was now it's where the thought and the thought is most of the times in schools or labs or workshops where people still have find a very fertile environment to develop new ideas. Interestingly in my opinion the best schools for the kind of integrated design for the liminal space so design that gives you a training that gives you also physical and virtual education tend to be the RCA absolutely the RCA in London maybe the Eindhoven Academy of Art and Design really good in Oslo there's a great interaction design department and in Lausanne in Switzerland there's an interesting school maybe to connect it to luxury but it's the untyped face in typography and then there are schools the media lab model which was really strong in the past and then it had a lull and it might now have a resurgence because there's a new president which is very promising it has sparked different embryonic examples like KAIST in Korea the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology so there are many different projects like this interestingly the potential is enormous but I see for instance in RISD John Mada is the new president there I find that the most interesting schools are the ones that are able to marry a sense of anthropology and material culture with new technology and a reminder of the centrality of human beings together with the capability of creating networks, interdisciplinary networks so in a way they're the more liquid ones ok now anybody has a question out there I would just like you to raise your hand stand up say who you are and what your organization is and keep the question fairly quick so that the answer can be nice and meaty now hi there's a fantastic talk Doug Ceri from the MIT Press so you're a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art you're not a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Design what is the difference in your mind between design and art today I had a meeting with Tony Dunn from the RCA just recently and they will not call their work art it's design in their mind Natalie Germagenko who has a PhD in engineering calls her work art called a salvo critical design art any number of people in your mind in the 21st century what is the difference between design and art I think it's more militancy in a way the difference between design and art cannot be told what you have in front of you because many designers use video or use concept and many artists really look to design to keep themselves grounded when I was teaching at UCLA many years ago I was teaching a course open to everybody I used to say that the only difference between an artist and a designer is that an artist can choose whether to be responsible towards other people the Hippocratic oath or not and instead a designer had to be by definition I think that the issue is a little bit of chip on the shoulder I mean art is recognized by everybody in culture as important and design instead is always lower on the rungs if you think about it all the so called established media in the United States have critics for architecture for art, three or four for theater dance, you know and nobody for design now how many people are touched by dance and how many people are touched by design it's important but the only bona fide international design critic is Alice Rostorn on the Herald Tribune and the Herald Tribune belongs to the New York Times but they don't use her in the print section you know in the art section she's only on the website so I think that people like Fiona and Tony are really militant not only that but also they want to stress the utility in the long run of what they do I mean if you look at the work of Dan and Rebe sometimes it looks like artwork performance pieces and you're like they did a wonderful piece that we're now acquiring into the MoMA collection that's called foragers in which they created a whole video and all the props that go with them to show that in the future in order to deal with a shortage of food we might need to outsource our gastrointestinal system literally so create this kind of prosthesis that enable us to digest algae and so on and so forth fantastic what is the difference between that and a Matthew Barney piece you know I mean formally almost nothing but in truth they position themselves in this particular current what they're doing is for the future of mankind and of technology and sometimes companies hire there to be their official thorns in the side you know by the way Tony Dan is the director of that design interactions program so they're my idols you know and I think that that's the reason you know sometimes you ideologically position yourself as designer because you want to improve the lot and you want to improve the destinies of designing the world or other times you want to stress your generosity or altruism and the fact that you are extroverted as opposed to introverted but truly especially in this world the only difference is intentions and the market because of course the art market has its own vagaries that I hope designers will stay away from even though it's becoming difficult thank you more questions so it's easy for you out there to see any raised hands there's one over here when you're getting the microphone coming hi Paola I'm Rahul work at ergonomy design I have a very short question I just want to know how you discover such amazing talent apart from the internet of course how did you travel the world and find out these amazing works or how did they come to you you want to be designed by the way is a really great design group that's existed for many years and it's a staple of the MoMA collection that's all about ergonomic design and extended usership well how do I find all these things I crowdsource a lot the blog was a way the first thing that I did even in 95 to do a show was to ask everybody I knew so it's very important to always be receptive I travel I'm here to look at the whole conference I'm not going to leave after my speech so that's where I'm going to find some I go to school shows if what I don't see in person I see online I follow certain Twitter people I mean I do what we all do and I try to sift through I'm pretty good at synthesizing and sifting through I think that's my gift and that's also why I'm in contemporary design and not in historical design I go so certain people can do it fast now that people don't but it's about having a good network and being online and on the road a lot we have time for one more question don't miss the opportunity there's one over there hi not everybody has the opportunity to go to MoMA all the time so what ways have you made it possible for people to enjoy sort of your creation of the great show thank you for reminding me to say it and thank you for the opportunity no no it's good because I was not doing the usual I'm supposed to plug this thing so thank you very much and we have a great great great great website by Stamen you know Stamen is the company San Francisco so it's a great website not only because it looks good but also because it's Twitter based so every object has a different page and all the Twitters are there and every object in the show has a different hashtag so they actually tweet about the individual objects so there's the website which has even more than the objects in the show and I've always done a website for every show because I think it's something that remains like even the one in 95 they gave me a budget of $320 because they didn't know what a website was so I learned HTML and I did it by myself and it's horrible it's still on the MoMA website if you want to see it mutant materials marbleized background really horrible but ever since you know we've done a website for every single exhibition that is never a rehashing of the show it's an object a work of design onto its own then we will also do virtual tours live tours live streaming tours at some point I think in September in October so it has a very good life online it's never like going physically to something but you know what I've also learned to kind of integrate we're very the plasticity of our brain and I'm using here plasticity in a way that is not scientifically correct but the way we're able to fill in the lack of physical presence with the imagination of the space and the understanding of the objects I think is really good what happens when you're not there in reality is that I think the attention span is different like being in a space I feel still works at a deeper level in terms of memorizing in terms of learning then seeing things online but otherwise there's a lot of surrogates that you can find from the catalog to the website to the Twitter flow talk to me 2011 is how our handle on Twitter and so there's a lot thank you so much thank you so much another huge applause thank you very very much