If you haven’t checked out Design and the Elastic Mind at the Moma yet, head over for a smorgasboard of collaborative and innovative works in a new exhibit that “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. ”

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve.

Out of planning the exhibit also came the SEED/MOMA salons, a monthly salon with the mission of bringing artists, designers and scientists together to discuss particular themes of relevance to all the fields involved: for example visual complexity, information design, time and space. In a recent Core 77 radio interview, Paola Antonelli (the curator of the exhibit) recounts her discussions with the editor of SEED and describes the points they found in common between science and design as being anything from “the taste for experimentation to how the computer made experimentation more immediately useful for further experimentation and … that both science and design wanted to change their position in people’s culture. Scientists wanted to stop being considered lofty and detached and wanted to show how much they were engaged in the real world, and designers were tired of being considered decorators, or value adders and wanted to show how much they could influence policy and really establish new behaviors for the world that could make the world a better place.”

Maybe ADB should start holding its own salons to explore interdisciplinary crossovers. It’s obvious from the exhibit that such collaboration and commonality can inspire some great work, like the exhibit’s biomimicry products (from chairs with bone-like structural integrity to BMWs based on puffer fish), constructions “grown” with nano-technology, design answers to the question of sustainable energy, and an all time favorite, visual manifestations of data sets! Among the familiar at the show were GRL’s L.A.S.E.R tag, Babel Blocks and the Million Dollar Blocks project. If you’re not able to make it in person, you can check out the online exhibit, but if you’re in NY, it’s definitely worth a visit. The amalgamated nature of the exhibit can be a bit overwhelming, but the vast amount of innovative developments and ideas leave much to be inspired by.