Tag Archives: preservation

Join Labs! Work with Digital Materials in the Collection

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There is a goldmine of digital materials in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection—rarities like prototypes donated by interaction design pioneer Bill Moggridge; gaming classics like the Game Time wristwatch (which you should really see in action! ); icons of product design like Apple’s iPhone; and artistic achievements in code by contemporary artist-designers like Aaron Koblin.

Digital Project, Ten Thousand Cents, 2007–08; Designed by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; USA; processing, adobe flash cs3, php/mysql, amazon mechanical turk, adobe photoshop, adobe after effects; Gift of Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; 2014-41-2; Object Record

Digital Project, Ten Thousand Cents, 2007–08; Designed by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; USA; processing, adobe flash cs3, php/mysql, amazon mechanical turk, adobe photoshop, adobe after effects; Gift of Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; 2014-41-2; Object Record

And we need your help! We are looking for two ultra-talented and fearless media spelunkers to dive into the collection and surface all of the computer, product design, and interaction design history within. We want you to help research and invigorate this part of the collection so that we can share it with the world. It’s a noble cause, and one that will help give museum visitors an even better experience of design at Cooper Hewitt.

One Laptop Per Child XO Computer, 2007; Designed by Yves Béhar, Bret Recor and fuseproject; injection molded abs plastic and polycarbonate, printed rubber, liquid crystal display, electronic components; steel, copper wire (power plug); H x W x D (closed): 3.5 × 22.9 × 24.1 cm (1 3/8 in. × 9 in. × 9 1/2 in.); Gift of George R. Kravis II; 2015-5-8-a,b; Object Record

One Laptop Per Child XO Computer, 2007; Designed by Yves Béhar, Bret Recor and fuseproject; injection molded abs plastic and polycarbonate, printed rubber, liquid crystal display, electronic components; steel, copper wire (power plug); H x W x D (closed): 3.5 × 22.9 × 24.1 cm (1 3/8 in. × 9 in. × 9 1/2 in.); Gift of George R. Kravis II; 2015-5-8-a,b; Object Record

Project Positions

We are hiring for two contract positions: Media Preservation Specialist and Time-Based Media Curatorial Assistant. The contractors will work together on the first phase of the Digital Collection Materials Project to survey and document collection items. Check out the official project announcement below to understand the full scope of the project.

To Apply

To apply for the Media Preservation Specialist or Time-Based Media Curatorial Assistant position:

  1. Read the official project announcement.
  2. Download the Request for Proposal for the position you wish to apply:
  3. Follow the Proposal Submission Guidelines outlined in the Request for Proposal.
  4. Submit your proposal to cooperhewittdigital@si.edu by December 20, 2016.

Looking forward to seeing your applications—we can’t wait to partner with you for this important work!

SketchBot (USA), 2012; Industrial Design by Universal Design Studio (United Kingdom); aluminum, plastic, assorted electrical components, javascript, html, css and python source files; H x W x D: 137.2 × 137.2 × 137.2 cm (54 × 54 × 54 in.); Gift of Google Inc.; s-g-1; Object Record

SketchBot (USA), 2012; Industrial Design by Universal Design Studio (United Kingdom); aluminum, plastic, assorted electrical components, javascript, html, css and python source files; H x W x D: 137.2 × 137.2 × 137.2 cm (54 × 54 × 54 in.); Gift of Google Inc.; s-g-1; Object Record

This project received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care and Preservation Fund, administered by the National Collections Program and the Smithsonian Collections Advisory Committee.

Sealing a Facebook App in amber

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One of the more painful things that happens from time to time is the decommissioning of a digital product. And in a museum this, of course, means trying to ‘preserve’ it.

But how do you ‘preserve a Facebook App’ built for an exhibition?

Cooper-Hewitt’s record breaking Set In Style exhibition of 2011 included the creation of both an iOS App and a Facebook App. The Set In Style Facebook App allowed users to add jewellery from the exhibition to their Facebook photos and share them on their wall and the walls of their friends.

A couple of months ago Facebook changed their security settings for Apps (again) and we were faced with a decision – turn it off, or pay to have the code rewritten to support the security changes. With the exhibition ended we opted to close the App down, but before we did so we decided to make a quick video of it in operation with a ‘real Facebook account’ so that the ‘social side’ of the App could be captured in a way that still screen grabs would not.

Here’s the video.

Some questions still remain.

Where does the ‘record’ for this ‘object’ now live? What ‘metadata’ needs to be associated with the ‘record’? What happens to the source code? Should it be released? If it was released, is the App so heavily reliant upon the infrastructure and sociality of Facebook itself that it would be useless?

(Our newest member of the Lab’s ‘Armory of Nerds’, Aaron Cope, has been thinking about these very same issues in regard to ‘preserving Flickr’ with his project Parallel-Flickr)

We’re interested in these sorts of questions at a meta-institutional level too, as, being ‘the National Design Museum’ we are inevitably going to have to be collecting ‘objects’ that face similar issues soon enough. Indeed, should a design museum be ‘collecting’ the designs of Facebook itself over the years? And how?