Museums should activate multiple senses, not just the eyeball | Ellen Lupton | TEDxMidAtlantic

So I'm a curator at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City. Come visit a museum curator. Do you know any museum curators? Do you relate to the museum? I didn't think about it and you know why we are so determined. and we are obsessed with one thing:

eyeball

s, museum curators love

eyeball

s and our favorite slogan, as you probably already know, is don't touch, so you go to a museum and you look and you look and you look until You're so tired you want to shut your mouth. eyeballs and go to sleep, don't get tired in the

museums

, you

just

can't wait to get to the gift shop and cafe.

I get tired in

museums

and recently I started thinking, what if we did an exhibition that wasn't? It's

just

eyeballs, what if we had an exhibition where you could touch, taste, smell and hear the things in the galleries right now? you're sitting in a chair, you barely know this chair, but this chair is touching you in a very intimate way he's not even running for president it's just a chair so I'm working on a new exhibition called design for the

senses

send me ideas I'm on a listening tour on a scratching tour and a soulful tour to discover what designers are doing to go beyond the eyeball the things we use the places we inhabit embrace our entire body show us where to go give us information not only through the eyeballs why does that matter?

When designers begin to

activate

multiple

senses

we create a world that is more interesting for everyone and more accessible to everyone that is why I want to show you some projects tactile city is a project created by teachers and students from Cooper Union in New York and the idea is to create sidewalks that are accessible to people with blindness and low vision. so there is a tactile strip that runs down the middle of the sidewalk and when someone communicates with that strip with their cane pattern, the slabs indicate trash cans, traffic signs, bus stops, building entrances and when a barrier appears construction, there is a textured mat that alerts you.

Before reaching the barrier, there is a barrier and a beacon that emits sound that tells you to move to turn and then, if necessary, a ramp that takes the pedestrian to street level and the touch barrier is a touch railing with information in Braille to provide you. Learn more about this obstruction and what to expect from it. Sometimes I have trouble crossing the street because I'm always looking at my phone and if you think about crosswalks, they're designed for people who look forward, but a lot of people don't. So a design firm in Melbourne, Australia, created this amazing proposal that adds lights to the tactile pavement at the crosswalk and directs people to cross the street safely, even if they don't look where they're going.

This is the one piece Bradley II watch. It is called a watch, not a watch, because it is completely touch-sensitive, so you can tell the time without looking at the watch. It is an incredible piece of engineering and design. It uses two ball bearings that move around the clock and indicate the hour and minute hands. It is named after Bradley Snyder, a Paralympic athlete and war veteran living in Baltimore, a great hero. These are tactile kitchen utensils designed to make kitchen activities safer and more enjoyable for people with low vision, so the cup has an indentation that tells you a place. where to hold the cup and when you pour liquid into the cup you can feel the temperature of the material change and then you are less likely to pour too much beautiful tactile feedback.

This is a cutting board with grooves that guides your hand while you are cutting and the high contrast black and white graphics are accessible to people with low vision and look great. Black and white always looks great. Everything we eat has texture. What if your spoon had its own texture? These incredible experimental pieces stimulate your tongue and palate with textures that are smooth, jagged or rough to amplify the sensation and flavor of what's in your mouth. Texture affects the taste and it also affects the sound. This is a desktop speaker that has removable inserts, each insert has a different texture and material that really changes the sound. exits the speaker making it warmer, wider, clearer or softer.

Musicians talk about color as the unique tone or texture of music. I'm going to play you a short piece by composer Michelle Qureshi where she applied a filter to a short phrase. of music to suggest different architectural settings for that music this room has a unique sound the café next door has a different sound so I want you to experience this silence this music and imagine the spaces that this phrase is reproducing in you different architectures of sound this is a project by one of my mica graduate students Ron Jiang, she created a system to visualize sound, she took the volume and frequency of the sound and guided them to the size and sharpness of the shape, so that the sharper be the sound, the point here will be the form and the result is these beautiful abstract painterly portraits of a place, all sound is vibration, the vibrations at the lowest level or the base notes and the sound or music that you can really feel like vibration against your skin at a concert, a subwoofer amplifies that effect and that is why loud music you really feel it against your heart against your chest it is not just our ears but our entire body experiencing that music this is a beautiful and simple speaker that the artist created to translate the sound of music into vibrations that are felt against the skin and The last piece I want to show you is an incredible functional prototype created by a young designer in Israel and it is a piece of jewelry that translates a sound frequency much broader in vibrations that can be felt against the skin, making it a way for people who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music in a truly unique way as a tactile engagement with the skin and what it has created here is a wonderful social experience where these two people share music together, listening to it together but not with their ears their bodies, that's why the designers are doing a lot to

activate

our senses to go beyond the empire of the eyeball and communicate with people on

multiple

levels, making the world more interesting and more inclusive and I think museums

should

be like that too.

I think they

should

be. Louder and scratchier here and smellier and more attractive of our entire being, so I'll end with this very short piece by Michele Qureshi called Museum in the Dark, thank you very much.