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Step by step, David Small's design innovations are moving technology off
the screen and into your life.
By Peter Hall
March 2003
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THE ASIA SOCIETY, 2001
Information designer David Small created an interactive table (opposite
page) where visitors can retrieve data from the museum's Web site. By
moving one of six rocks over a map projection, visitors can access
subjects such as headline news, cuisine, and the Asia
Society Rockefeller Collection.
Photograph by Evan Kafka for Metropolis
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Six smooth white stones, like ostrich eggs, sit on top of round white tables
in the renovated lobby of the Asia Society and Museum in New York. When
one of the stones, etched with the words food cuisine, is placed over one
country on a tabletop map of Asia, magical things start to happen. The map
moves, the country name swells, and text and images relaying the region's
culinary traditions rise to the surface of the table, as if called from
the depths of the adjacent oceans.
Each stone is in fact a carefully disguised computer mouse, and the tabletop
an interactive screen. The content revealed by maneuvering the stones is
recalled from the Asia Society Web site. But the sensual appeal of this
process has the effect of making the information seem more interesting.
Visitors are not clicking and dragging, but sliding and retrieving: dredging
the interactive oceans for information. The tables have been a big hit with
visitors. "Before the renovation, our building wasn't very public-friendly,"
says vice president of marketing Karen Karp. "Now people come in and
sit and use the tables--they refer to them as the 'geography tables.' They
love using them to answer questions."
David Small, whose firm developed the tables in collaboration with designer
Andrew Davies, is quickly establishing a reputation for making beguilingly
poetic interfaces that hide the machinations of computers. At Small Design's
installation at last summer's Documenta11 art exposition in Kassel, Germany,
visitors turning the pages of a blank book triggered the apparition of dancing
chunks of text, which emanated from a ceiling-mounted projector. In Boston
this fall, the stone floor and walls of a neoclassical library lobby became
a surface for Small's computer-driven typographic projections. For this
37-year-old designer and graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
anything is a fair trade for the computer monitor. "We're entering
an exciting decade," Small says. "There's going to be a lot more
opportunity to use the computer for what computers can do, where displays
start to morph and become pervasive--and it's not just a CRT on a desk.
We're pushing stuff out of the computer and into the room."
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THE MUSEUM OF SEX, 2002
For the inaugural exhibit, Small turned the legal documents of a 1903
sex-crime case into touch-screen displays.
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Courtesy Small Design Firm Inc.
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Now based in Cambridge, Massachussetts, Small grew up in a suburban Jewish
home in Connecticut, where his parents ran a company selling microscopes.
He does not shy away from bringing personal influences into his work, be
they holy scriptures or suburban tchotchkes. Inspiration for the stones
at the Asia Society came from a pair of egg-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers
in his parents' home. To complete the Connecticut profile, Small is a dyed-in-the-cashmere
fan of über-homemaker Martha Stewart and her pristine empire (even
as it begins to reveal cracks). Four years ago, while a graduate student
at the MIT Media Lab, he got wind of an impending visit by the doyenne of
domesticity and, using the lab's $40,000 commercial laser cutter (intended
for etching plastics), imprinted the image of her face onto the skin of
an eggplant. Martha was tickled and before long Small was zapping type onto
apples and eggs for a special tenth-anniversary issue of Martha Stewart
Living and making a guest appearance on her TV show.
Driving these seemingly quirky digressions, however, is Small's belief that
technology can change the way we read. When text can be rendered or projected
on any surface, and then be made to move and overlap, it opens up realms
of possibilities. "How much of reading is based on the limitations
of print and not on what we're physiologically capable of?" he asks
rhetorically. "Marshall McLuhan said that TV is really radio with pictures.
We're still at the stage where a Web browser is a piece of paper on the
screen." Small holds the optimistic view that in the age of multimedia
our attention spans are not so much decreasing as diversifying. He cites
studies from the 1970s that show how reading time increases if the eye remains
in the same spot and the text moves. "What our eyes have to do to read
type that is flying around a screen is very different from scanning a line
of text to the end and coming back to the beginning of the next. We apprehend
stuff faster now."
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HALL OF IDEAS, 2002
In Small's design for the Mary Baker Eddy Library of the Christian
Science Church in Boston, projected words flow out of a fountain (above)
and come together in sentences on the wall (below).
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Courtesy Small Design Firm Inc.
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Small's doctoral thesis at MIT was titled "Rethinking the Book"
and culminated in a project using digital technology to juxtapose the Torah
with corresponding sacred writings in the Talmud and a commentary by philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas. The result, an interactive book with pleasingly anachronistic
dial controls, was imagined as a tool with which a rabbi might "perform"
an exegesis of the sacred texts, exploring the thorny issues of interpretation
and translation. The project managed to convey the dimensionality of a book
while exploiting the fluid properties of text on screen. The pages could
be arranged and overlaid by turning the dial to move them in and out of
the reader's primary field of attention. A page from the Torah might remain
in focus, for example, while the referring page from the Talmud would hang,
out of focus, in the background. The project was singled out for the Cooper
Hewitt, National Design Museum's Design Culture Now 2000 triennial show.
The art of evoking spiritual reverence with the help of typo-technological
miracles is most spectacularly realized in a project Small Design recently
completed in Boston for the Christian Science church. In the newly renovated
neoclassical lobby of the $25 million Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment
of Humanity, Small's group has contributed a typographic animation called
the "Hall of Ideas." The centerpiece is a circular water fountain
made of bronze and glass by the sculptor Howard Ben Tré. With the
help of five hidden networked computers and ceiling-mounted projectors,
letterforms swirl out of the fountain and swim across the floor, forming
words as they go. The words finally climb up one of two screen-covered arches
on the wall, where they assemble into the form of an edifying quotation
by an influential thinker. About 800 of these quotations gradually escape
from the fountain before the computer begins to repeat itself, raising the
possibility that a curious visitor might spend an entire day contemplating
the passage of the word from the oracle--or baptismal font--to the soaring
arches of wisdom.
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HUMAN GENOME INTERACTIVE, 2001
This display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago gives
visitors an introduction to the human genome by, among other things,
making connections between the DNA of people and animals.
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Courtesy Small Design Firm Inc.
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Underlying the project is the church's notion that great ideas have a universal
value, whether they are uttered by Benazir Bhutto or Billy Graham (both
varieties take the typographic journey across the Hall of Ideas). "Great
ideas don't know politics," says the library's creative director, Chet
Manchester. "They transcend borders, politics, and cultures."
Cultural relativists might call such a premise glib or naive, but its popular
appeal is indisputable. The library's CEO, Steve Danzansky, argues that
with the growth of alternative medicine, there has been a resurgence of
interest in Mary Baker Eddy's writings on spiritual healing and the inseparable
nature of mind and body. "She had a great love of the power of ideas
to transform experience," he says. "We wanted to take this hall,
built in 1935, and match it to the dynamism of her ideas."
Manchester adds that the library chose Small to work on the Hall of Ideas
after seeing his Talmud project. "Two things struck us: his forward-thinking
innovation and his way of using technology to invite you to think in fresh
ways," Manchester says. "Much of what he was doing seemed to bring
out the universality of ideas and concepts."
Back at Small Design's offices, however, the prevailing philosophy seems
to be less about grand narratives than about proud idiosyncrasy. The interior
is furnished with a green coffee table, unmatched armchairs with fading
pink or blue upholstery, and a collection of identical foot-high toy robots.
Outside the eight-story office building a giant company sign parodies the
large corporation, suggesting that the whole edifice must be Small space.
In fact, Small has a 650-square-foot room with four employees (three of
whom are MIT grads, including his boyfriend, Michael McKenna).
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THE TALMUD PROJECT, 1999
For his MIT thesis, Small designed a prototype for an interactive book
that displays passages from the Torah, the Talmud, and an essay by
French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
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Knobs are used to bring linked passages of text into and out of focus
behind one another, as seen in this display of the Talmud Project
(above) at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's 2000 triennial.
Courtesy Small Design Firm Inc.
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Small still thinks the firm is a tad too large, having watched too many
of his friends borrow millions for upstart dot-coms only to see them crash.
Small will remain small. "You have to be your brand," he says
with a mischievous grin. "I learned that from Martha."
He shows me his copy of Tijuana Bibles, a tome of starkly different ilk
from the Talmud: it compiles the eponymous 1930s comic books that depicted
well-known celebrities and cartoon characters in pornographic stories. This
is the subject of one of four installations Small Design created for the
inaugural exhibit at the Museum of Sex in New York. For the grisly case
of Helen Jewett--a New York prostitute whose murder in 1836 became the first
sex crime to set off a national media circus--Small worked with sculptor
José Rodriguez on a life-size model of a woman under a bedsheet;
on it are projected excerpts from increasingly ominous letters between Jewett
and her lover, the alleged murderer. A touch-screen display, meanwhile,
tells the story of a bath-house raid in New York in 1903, in which police
descriptions of the sexual acts being performed are vivid enough to suggest
that the cops might have been doing more than taking notes.
Roger Mann, cofounder of the London-based exhibition-design firm Casson
Mann, which designed the overall show, brought Small Design in on the project
after seeing the tables at the Asia Society. "Some of the stories are
intriguing and moving but are buried in rather dry objects," Mann says,
"so interaction is a way of fleshing out the stories and bringing them
to life." The bath-house display, for example, is constructed from
courtroom transcripts. Other artifacts are literally dry: the antique comic
books are too fragile to be fingered by salacious visitors, so Small's team
created a tactile screen that opens up the comics in an embedded flat-panel
display. Mann considers Small Design to be on a par with a handful of firms
specializing in interactive technology applied to exhibitions, including
Immersion Studios in Toronto and Durrell Bishop and Andrew Hirniak of IDEO.
But, he adds, the real beauty of each team's work "is the preoccupations
and interests that come out in what people do."
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