Curious Minds: New Approaches in Design is a new exhibition that challenges our definitions of design and encourages a new discourse about the role design plays in shaping our world.
The exhibition, which opened on December 16 and remains on view through April 14, 2012 at the Israel Museum, focuses on mapping out new territories in today's design arena. Today's technology is allowing a new generation of designers to transcend previously conventional models of design development and manufacture. However, unlike their predecessors, many of these young designers do not reject the past in favor of new technologies, but rather draw inspiration from historical models to develop projects that combine the traditional with the new.
Among the nearly forty works on display in the exhibition are works by Maria Blaisse, El Ultimo Grito, Julius Popp, rAndom International, Raw Edges, Stefan Sagmeister, Studio Drift, Troika, and others-altogether representing twenty seven designers and studios from fifteen countries worldwide.
For the past few decades, designers have explored digital and interactive technologies to produce innovative work and, under the umbrella of "critical design," used design to ask probing questions about human behavior and to address the social, cultural, and ethical consequences of emerging technologies. Curious Minds focuses attention on designers who challenge mainstream design and consumer culture in various ways. Although they represent a rich diversity of design practice, their work reveals a shared curiosity about life and often contains elements of playfulness.
"While each of these designers embraces the potential of new technologies, they do so in order to create works that are as much about beauty, poetry, and inspiration as about technology itself, relating in rich ways to the history of traditional art, craft, and design," states James Snyder, Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Israel Museum.
Works in the exhibition are presented in four categories: Post Digital - Poetic Gestures; Future Scenarios; The Process of Making; and Design - Real Time.