While the Color Chart show was practically empty during most of my visit, the other sixth floor exhibition space was completely packed, both with people and with things to look at. “Design and the Elastic Mind” is a fascinating, fun show that deserved more time than I had to give it yesterday. One problem was that because the show was so crowded, you feel rushed to read the display cards and move along quickly. Yet many of the objects on display require some contemplation and reading the placards is important to understand what you are seeing. (If only they could “design” a better way to put on a show like this…? I guess the online interactive interface is pretty nifty, though it’s very hard to read on my screen and a bit overwhelming.)

The exhibition is about innovation and how designers are trying to solve some of the problems the world faces in a time of rapid change and major dislocations. Mostly what I got out of it was a sense of how exciting it might be to be a researcher or product designer working on these problems. (Not quite exciting enough for me to think about reverting to my prior career, however.)

Of the dozens and dozens of items on display, there are a few that particularly stick in the mind. Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monster had people lining up to give it a try. You enter a room with a giant lightbox behind you and a large screen in front of you, ostensibly with your shadow being cast onto the screen. Yet something is not quite right: the shadow isn’t exactly you, but rather a monstrous (in a playful way) adaptation, with chirps, burps, and roars of audio as well as amazing cartoon-like shadow animation (e.g., flick your wrist and you can cause your shadow monster to flick off some flying birds, or open your hands like jaws and your shadow somehow has teeth!). This one had the kids giggling and the grownups laughing along as well. (I should note that, unlike the Color Chart show, Design and the Elastic Mind was full of kids.)

A number of information visualizations caught my eye. Aaron Koblin used North American flight data to create a dazzling, firework-like sparkler of flight paths. In a similar display, the “New York Telephone Exchange” animates the volume of phone calls between New York City and the rest of the world. Various parts of the globe grow and shrink over time as the volume of traffic ebbs and flows (though it seems we have a lot of traffic to and from India no matter the time of day).

Many products on display aim to help the world, from “solar-powered” water decontamination jugs to efficient space heaters. At a time when the world sometimes seems out of control without much cause for optimism, I found that, at least a little bit, it was a relief to be presented with some evidence that there are people out there coming up with very out-of-the-box, transformative solutions to some challenging problems. If you have any interest at all in technology, design, or what the future might look like, I’d highly recommend a visit to this show.