The Thing Tank is an exhibition of design fictions currently on display on the ground floor of Gund Hall at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. It was developed within the setting of a spring 2019 seminar/studio that I taught structured around a sequence of case studies of exemplary 20th century Italian artifacts devised to suit fundamental needs of modern life: sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling, cooking, writing, calculating, and entertainment. Though…
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Tag: collections-based teaching
This fall, the Knight Foundation issued an open call for ideas in the form of a new News Challenge. The foundation is seeking an answer to the question: how might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities? The challenge reads: We view libraries as key for improving Americans’ ability to know about and to be involved with what takes place around them. The library has been a vital part of our…
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One of the major outputs from metaLAB’s 2014 summer Getty workshop has now become available in pdf: a “field guide” to working with collections data sets. Developed by the entire metaLAB team and, in particular, our interns Laura Mitchell (editor) and Ebru Boyaci (designer), the field guide documents the concepts and flows of information that came out of the workshop, linking critical discussion with invitations to experimentation and making. Using a range of modes, including…
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This coming summer, metaLAB will be hosting a two-week workshop for art historians, scholars of visual culture, and museum professionals at all career stages on the topic of Beautiful Data: Telling Stories About Art with Open Collections. Supported by the Getty Foundation, the workshop will introduce participants to the concepts and skills necessary to make use of open collections to develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital…
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Today my colleagues Matthew Battles, Pablo Barria and I presented the Curarium project to this year’s class of Berkman Center fellows, as well as a lively group of Berkman friends and Berkmaniacs. Curarium is a platform designed to leverage the power of the crowd in order to annotate, curate, and augment works within and beyond their respective collections, with the aim of constructing sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as…
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