Miranda Luong-LookingOutwards-05

A new experience designed by Local Projects in partnership with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The Pen at the Cooper Hewitt offers visitors a chance to experiment with creating their own designs. Visitors employ a Pen on interactive tables to explore the museum’s archive of objects, manipulate them and design their own. To do so, visitors draw on a gridded screen and watch as their objects are rendered live as 3D Computer Graphics on another screen adjacent to the first. While I don’t know of the specific algorithm utilized to program the Pen, Cooper Hewitt explains that the Pen’s interface with the interactive tables employs conductive materials common to touchscreen styli. I find this project truly inspiring as it provides a very new and much more immersive way for visitors to engage with works on view in the museum. Reading the project brief and having used the Pen myself, I can tell that its creators wanted to make something very unique, that spoke to the specificities of a design museum. The Pen goes beyond what is offered by an app as it invites visitors to learn about design by designing themselves.