"Designers are so intrinsically important to society today because they're the ones that make progress usable by people," declares Museum of Modern Art architecture and design curator Paola Antonelli from her dim office (a protest against fluorescent lighting) looking out onto West Fifty-fourth Street. Her upcoming exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind, showcases—through a maze of physical objects, videos, and interactive displays—more than 200 items that stretch the limits of popular understanding, whether at the frontiers of science, technology, or human behavior. Among them are these brain-benders: a blown-glass bubble housing bees that diagnose disease or monitor fertility by detecting vital signs in human breath; a concept for victimless in vitro–cultured meat made entirely from sample cells; and a device that helps dogs communicate with people by translating tail wags into words displayed in a LED readout. (Ninety wags per minute means "I really love you.")
The Sardinian-born Antonelli, who joined the museum in 1994, has a sixth sense for predicting cultural shifts—and the power to crown design kings. She is also a resourceful headhunter and information gatherer. "I send an e-mail with a basic description of the show to everybody I know, including my mom's butcher in Milan," she says, leaning back in a red Sacco beanbag chair and describing her methodology for finding new material. For her part, Antonelli is thrilled by the possibilities of nanotechnology, and she looks to designers to surmount everyday problems of pace and scale and to accommodate new definitions of materiality in light of threatened resources. Though visitors to the exhibition—which opens February 24—may feel like they've jumped down a rabbit hole with Buckminster Fuller, the idea is to emerge on the flip side. "I'm hoping that a lot of people who see with frustration their weariness with the continuous change of technology will just realize that it's about adaptability," Antonelli soothes. "And it's all about choice. So if they don't want to, they don't have to."
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