Blog posts tagged as 'moma'

Suwappu – the augmented-reality toy we invented with Dentsu London is a nominee this year in the Digital category of the Designs Of The Year show at London’s Design Museum.

It’s in great company – with other nominees in the category such as the Kinect, the Guardian’s iPad app (which we also consulted on, with Mark Porter and the brilliant internal team at the paper), High Arctic by UVA and others.

The Suwappu certainly get around a bit – here they are last year where they went to Pop!Tech with me to speak about toys, play and learning in a Robot-Readable World.

And last year they also lived for a while at MoMA, at the Talk To Me exhibit…

We worked with Dentsu London from their original idea to bring them to life through model-making and animation, and then build working prototype software on the cutting-edge of what’s possible in computer-vision on smartphones.

It’s great to have partnerships like this that can rapidly get all the way from a strategic idea ‘What if toys were a media channel’ through to working, real things that can be taken to market.

That’s our favourite thing!

Of course – it’s a lovely bonus when they get recognised in a wider cultural context such as MoMA or the Design Museum.

As well as making our own products, we spend most of our time in the studio working closely in partnership with clients to create new things for them – making strategy real through research, design, making and communication.

Do get in touch if you and your company would like to work with us this way.

Back in 2009, BERG created Here & There — a horizonless projection of Manhattan, and a new kind of city map that let you see simultaneously where you are and where you’re going. (The art prints are not currently on sale, and we’re not currently planning a reprint.)

Last year, the uptown and downtown maps were included in Talk to Me, an exhibit at MoMA – the Museum of Modern Art in New York – about design, things, technology and people, alongside some incredible peers and inspirational design work. (Read about Here & There on the Talk to Me website.)

(Here & There at Talk to Me, photo by Fiona Romeo.)

Last week, our Here & There maps became the latest addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

I feel privileged and proud that our maps of Manhattan now have a permanent home in New York and at MoMA!

Many thanks to MoMA’s Acquisition Committee, and huge congratulations to the team: Jack Schulze, James King, and Campbell Orme.

If you’d like to read more, our previous blog posts about Here & There dig into the appearances and design influences of the project.

(A thought… we’ve been wondering about Here & There for other cities, perhaps as public display and taking the concept in new directions. It would have to be in partnership with a brand, so if you have any ideas then do get in touch: info@berglondon.com.)

Talk to Me, MoMA’s new exhibition about design and the communication between people and objects opened this week at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. We’re very proud to be a part of a show that pulls together so many potent strands of contemporary design:

New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Talk to Me explores this new terrain, featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale.

There is an enormous amount of work that we value and admire across the exhibition. A range of games from the experimental Passage, Chromaroma and Sharkrunners to Little Big Planet, SimCity and Spore. It’s great to see Usman Haque’s Pachube alongside other sensor networks and platforms such as Homesense and Botanicalls.

There are physical interactive products such as David Rose’s ever-impressive connected medicine container Glowcaps, the exquisitely crafted musical interfaces Monome and Tenori-on, the empowering iOS payment interface Square and the characterful and playful Tengu, alongside popular apps like Talking Carl and Wordlens.

There’s a wide range of mapping work, from the early and potent They Rule to Prettymaps, Legible London, Ushahidi and Walking Papers. And there is plenty of work that defies classification such as Camille Scherrer’s The Haunted Book, Kacie Kinzer’s wonderfully simple and affective social Tweenbots and Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented (hyper) Reality.

BERG has seven works in the show. The bendy maps Here and There, the interactive exploration of scale BBC Dimensions, the films made with the Touch project exploring the qualities of touch and RFID: Nearness and Immaterials: Ghost in the Field, our collaborations with Dentsu London on Media Surfaces: Incidental Media, The Journey and the augmented toys Suwappu.

For such a broad exhibition it is great to see all of the works curated and presented with such thought and attention to the quality of each piece.

The exhibition takes place in the MoMA Special Exhibitions Gallery, from 24 July until 7 November 2011. Thanks to Paola Antonelli and the Talk to Me team for the excellent and patient work in putting this all together.