I’m away on business until Sunday, so the regular Four for Friday will resume next week.  In the meantime, this caught my eye today.

The New York Times today has an article previewing the Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition entitled “Design and the Elastic Mind,” which opens next week and remains in place until May 12.  The concept for the show is an interesting one:

Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field [of design & technology]. It focuses on designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

When you translate that out of art-speak, the exhibition is at its core a look at the way that new and novel technologies, and the way that we interact with those technologies on a day-to-day basis, have influenced designers.  The result is artwork that sounds quite fascinating:

Joris Laarman’s “Bone Chair” was created with computer software that mimics the creation of human bones. The weight and stresses on a typical chair are programmed into the computer, which then works out an appropriate “bone” structure, churning out a series of increasingly refined prototypes. (The final computer version has a raw, undigested quality, but Mr. Laarman couldn’t resist adding a final dash of aesthetic refinement by smoothing over the rough edges, a nice little example of how reluctant some designers are to yield control.)

I for one will be going to see this show as soon as I get back to New York. I think it’s pretty apparent that I feel strongly that design should serve a practical function while retaining a pleasing aesthetic, and this show sounds as though it’ll show off the best of that very convergence.