All of these examples, plus countless others all over the internet (like the data presentation-as-movie-poster we featured here) hew to one specific purpose: compile data into various charts, graphs, or even just basic numbers. Design beautifully. Present to public.

What got me thinking about the popularity and formulas of infographics is a new exhibition currently running through April 12th at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, which has much of the same underlying philosophy: it uses data to create art, only instead of presenting it as attractive charts and graphs, it features actual art installations that were ‘compiled’ through the use of various types of raw data.

It’s a fresh idea very much in line with the zeitgeist: harnessing the massive amounts of free data available online and organizing it in such a way that its conclusions are displayed not as numerical tables but pieces designed for contemplation. While all art is a collection and re-interpretation of data (visual, aural, etc, filtered through the eyes and brain of the artist), I’m unaware of a previous exhibition taking the accumulation and presentation of raw information so literally.

Featured in the exhibition are plenty of works from the well-known Aaron Koblin, including his “laser ranging system” last seen in Radiohead’s House of Cards video, plus his project called “Ten Thousand Cents“, where 10,000 online users (all anonymous) contributed to a master drawing of a $100 bill. If you click on any of the 10,000 portions of the bill, you can see a division between the original scan and an animation of the drawn re-creation. While the final result is, well, what you’d expect (a slightly iffy $100 bill), the fact that as an artwork, and has 10,000 anonymous artists and all the steps they took in its creation, is fascinating use of the ‘hive mind’.

Also featured in the exhibition is the grandfather of all great data-posters, by Charles Joseph Minard: Napoleon’s March to Moscow. This and other works like it (it was done in 1869) are the direct inspiration behind the great poster work at sites like historyshots: presenting data in an large, easily-digested, arresting, and beautiful format.

There’s plenty of art out there that uses raw data in various ways: various contemporary installations have been doing it for some time, and we might even make the argument that certain memorials function as great artworks, too. I’m thinking mainly of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, which, while admirably serving its primary function as a memorial to the dead, also works stunningly well on an aesthetic level, taking the chronological names of the war dead and displaying them in a unique fashion.

Most of today’s exhibits strive for a higher level of automation and calculation (in the computerized sense of the word).

This exhibit reminds me of another piece of data-art that came from Flickr some months ago, when they took geo-coded tags from all the people who tag the location where they took a photo (or have a camera that does it for them), and created a series of continental maps based on those co-ordinates. The results were remarkably accurate, and all generated entirely from photographic metadata.

It’s not so hard to envision dozens of future projects along the same lines, pulling raw data from a variety of sources and going beyond just a clean API integration, taking it into a completely unexpected space where the data functions as the primary creator behind a piece of art. This is the ultimate in “Container Art”, in that the real artistry is in the intake and manipulation of otherwise random or unadulterated data.

Something less automatic but no less enjoyable: this project putting two years’ of Twittering into a book, which is plenty interesting on its own, and mines a data source for a type of journal or log you simply are not going to see anywhere else. This is another example of raw data being transformed into a strangely personal kind of art. People complain that no one keeps journals anymore (wait, do they?), but here we have exactly that. You just have to move it off your computer and onto some paper.

AIGA (The Professional Association for Design) does a yearly survey called AIGA 365: The Year in Design. They’ve chosen a whole series of top examples for 2008 to put into the archives, all sorted into 10 different categories. From their writeup:

AIGA’s suite of competitions is widely recognized as the most discerning statement on design excellence today, extending a legacy that began 90 years ago. By means of the competitions, AIGA creates a chronicle of outstanding design solutions, each demonstrating the process of designing, the role of the designer and the value of design.

Their 29th Annual Year in Design is online now, and I’ve sifted through the 10 categories and pulled out some of my favorite selections. And so, for your enjoyment:

Brand and Identity Systems Design: Bretenic Limited Stationary System

Here’s a piece of work from a Toronto design shop that uses good copy and comical prose to illustrate why a lawyer and specialist is good to work with. It’s well-presented and direct, and the approach of the piece matches the approach of the client, which is funny and down to earth.

Corporate Communications Design: Take Action Postcards to the Edge

There weren’t a ton of wonderful examples in here, I found, but this set of postcards about dissidents being persecuted in other countries is concise, catchy, and embodies a spirit of design slightly different than much of the NGO “design ghetto” (if such a thing exists, and from my impressions it sort of does).

Editorial Design: New York Times Magazine

These guys don’t quit. I’ve written about their extremely skilled lead designer before, and these two nominations here are making me think about a subscription. Consistently, eye-catching, and beautiful to look at, week in and week out. I missed the recent food issue, which I’m sure was full of various mouth-watering things alongside some fantastic articles.

Experience Design: Detroit Institute of Arts Interactive Installations

Although I can’t vouch for this, not having been to the museum, the idea of watching a period meal being served while you sit at a kind of virtual table, as a way of presenting silverware and other period flatware and furniture and cooking habits, is kind of awesome. Plus it’s easily the best way to answer that eternal question we’ve all grappled with: “how can I make my 18th century flatware collection relevant to contemporary youngsters?” Now you know.

Information Design: The Normandy Campaign

I wish computer technology was at this stage back when I was sent to museums on various school trips, although I remember the series of blinking lights and various switches that moved things were equally as enthralling as this interactive touch-screen map of the Normandy campaign probably is. Everything is fun when you’re a kid. Ah hell, it still is.

Motion Graphics: TV Land Refresh

This category, I’ve got to say, is lacking a touch–the nominations were fine, but not mind-blowing, and from a design standpoint I just don’t think Modest Mouse’s Dashboard video needs to win a prestigious design award. I know it’s motion graphics, but that’s a wide category, considering what I eventually chose at their best selection: this refresh of the TV Land network, which is clean, contemporary, and not annoying. For a retro network that shows nothing but old reruns, it’s great, actually. No old TVs with rabbit ears sticking out of them or bouncy retro graphics–although I’m an unabashed fan of vintage things, showing Brady Bunch reruns doesn’t mean you have to embrace the tv-in-the-60s aesthetic for your entire network.

Packaging Design: Ultrasilencer

Well I wanted Criterion’s Breathless DVD set, but the Ultrasilencer takes it. When the hell are you ever going to get a Vacuum Cleaner with modernist Helvetica styling on all its packaging? This wins my personal award for “making Jordan kind of interested in a product he wouldn’t otherwise give a crap about.” Thanks to this design I seriously started thinking that maybe this product was some kind of revolutionary thing, until I realized the object I was thinking about was a vacuum cleaner.

Promotional Design and Advertising: Planet Propaganda

The posters of Planet Propaganda, collectively, win this one. This is a massive category and it’s kind of ridiculous to choose one, especially since I just complained about ‘honorifics’ in another article, but hey, I’m not actually handing out awards here, just picking my favourites.

Typographic Design: Sculpture Today

This ‘Paper Alphabet for Sculpture Today’ is fantastic. Typography done with paper that looks beautiful. Plus the “C” looks like my cherished Commodore 64 logo.

Book Design: Underachiever’s Manifesto

While there are a ton of quality choices here, the Underachiever’s Manifesto gets my vote. It was a tossup between this and a few others (All the Sad Young Literary Men I really like), but the “mistake is the whole point” simplicity of the cover won me over.

Logo design is crazy, as it’s extremely simplified work that gets crammed into finely-honed, pored-over design. If there’s any area of design where a company’s CEO is going to want to cast his judgement, it’s going to be here, and the pitfalls inherent in wanting something trendy or flashy, or listening to insane amounts of buzzwords from branding experts more versed in talk than in actual design runs extremely high

So the winners of the WOLDA awards tend towards simplicity, which is great. This year, the winner is the One Degree logo from Rupert Murdoch’s initiative. It’s a simple logo with a clearly-defined concept behind it, which sorta makes it one of the best in the world for 2008. Good logo design can be notoriously hard to judge, so sometimes you have to give these a bit of time. It’s hard to know what kind of logo will be instantly memorable, even if you’re a pro at it.

I really love this one, since it highlights the foreignness of something without resorting to silly cliche. It’s great and entirely typographical, and uses just a series of accents with a slightly foreign sounding name to get it all across. Foreign hats work like accents on your head.

This winner of the “Best of Europe” is perfect. I don’t think you could ask for a better wine logo. It’s not false-prestigious, even though the name could have easily made it so. It’s just simple, clean, and beautiful.

This “Best of Belgium” logo, for a handbag company, is also fantastic. It covers the idea using what seems to be only typography at the beginning, until you realize it’s also the product itself. Great work.

La Main Gauche from France is great, even though I don’t know exactly what it is (ah, I’ve since discovered it’s an events agency), but since it means ‘the left hand’ and since a ‘good left’ involves a punching bag, I’ll accept the connection. It’s not the best one here, but it’s memorable.

This one, for the British company Education International, works extremely well too–using lines and ultra-basic basic shapes to cover the fact that it involves reading and education and well, little else. Modernist design personified. Go-post-soviet design! (it was done in Romania.)

Switzerland Alps and Arts is an example of what I like to think of as classic logo design–no puns, no tricks, no obsessive study about what the meaning of it is and all the rest, instead it’s just some alps and some lines and a simple, straightforward logo that you’d get 50 years ago from a quality agency.

And if that’s not enough and you still need more quality logo design resources, check out this invaluable site.

2006 saw the launch of Illustrative, a new festival/exhibition in Berlin that celebrates illustration and graphic art. Having taken place this year in Zurich between the 18th and 26th of October, it drew 35 different artists, and showcased over 400 works.

Its main thrust is described as “documenting the influence of illustration and graphic arts on other disciplines like book illustration, fashion and textile-arts, pottery, and animated movies.” The point is to trace how illustration and graphic art feature in, or are essential parts of, the many facets of ‘contemporary art’.

What this really means is you’re getting a ton of great illustration gathered all in one place. And as an excellent sideline, the exhibition hosts a Young Illustrators Award, in three separate categories that include Illustration, Book Art, and Animation.

A funny thing: even though I’m writing on design all the time, I’m still often in the dark when it comes to the genre terms “illustration” and “graphic art”. That’s fine: part of the point of their recent resurgence is the inability to pin contemporary illustration down into one, specific category, as was possible 100 years ago.

Take a look at this interview with Pascal Johanssen, one of the two Berlin-based curators of Illustrative, who outlines what “contemporary illustrative art” means to him:

It’s a new art movement. Unlike classic illustration it is a mix of influences from comic art, graffiti, fashion, advertisement, set design for computer games or animation. This form of illustrative art is marked by very different creative impulses and thus can be design or art.

He also describes the fundamental differences between what he sees as the previous generation of illustrators and today’s. I’ve never really thought about things in these terms before:

The parent generation for me is represented by illustrators like Tomi Ungerer. These have been willful, charismatic drawers. They were close to political caricatures, which was in accordance with the common operational fields of illustration back then. Today´s illustrators are mainly avant-garde regarding innovative means of design.

And finally, he’s asked in which direction illustration is moving at the moment. His answer is probably prescient, but it’s strange–I’ve been hearing a version of this answer, across several disciplines, for some time now. Read on:

Game Art will come up. This will be an art genre which will not only copy the aesthetics of computer games, like Eboy, but uses the graphical, narrative and technological means emerging from computer games and making them possible. Something new will develop in this field.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that games are the new, growing, soon-to-be-fundamental frontier for: advertising, literature, interactive experience, socialization, social networking, and entertainment in general. No one actually knows if it’ll happen, but for the moment I see games as still, essentially, games.

Yeah, there are massive networks like World of Warcraft. There are games everyone in the world plays, like Grand Theft Auto 4. There are games like The Sims 2. But they’re still just games. There are still stores that sell only video games, all staffed by the same 5 dudes that ran them when I was 10. Or at least it seems that way.

I’ll save a further exploration of that subject for another day, but it strikes me that Johannson’s answer here is actually not overblown like many of the video-games-are-taking-over-all-media claims: the area in which games and art will strongly converge might indeed be one where the very facility of young designers with video games (and the technologial means that bring them about) could actually create an entirely new field of art, and a big one at that. Just a prediction.

One can’t miss event during the exhibiton–especially for anyone interested in vintage art or just wonderfully detailed design–was Roman Bittner’s talk on his “Ancient Cities of Tomorrow” series. These are e-boy like illustrations taken to another level and really, really captivating. Check out his studio here.

Anyway, if you were lucky enough to be wandering around Zurich in October, staring at mountains and drinking their water straight from the clean, fresh rivers, hopefully you caught up with Illustrative.

Here’s a really interesting, strange project we’ve come across: birdhouses made to look like Dictator’s Palaces. We’ve got examples of Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Mussolini’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, and Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament. What the hell is this, exactly?

First, what I took out of it: I like the sly idea of diminishing the self-important, repression-founded architecture of dictators by making such work into birdhouses. That said, the original pieces these birdhouses are based on aren’t automatically horrible or despicable just because their commissioners were. A lot has been said about Albert Speer and the fact that inherent within a kind of ‘Nazi Architecture’ is the inescapable idea of Nazism, which thereby invalidates the architecture. You can make the point, but then you have to make a different version of the same point about slaves and the Coliseum, for example. Within the spectrum of 20th-century architecture, there are actually some examples of fascist architecture here in Rome that I appreciate on a certain level.

But there’s always something (intentionally) brutal and cold about those buildings–a feeling amplified when walking around the rest of Rome and encountering some of the most comfortable, humane, welcoming urban spaces ever constructed. So I like the transposition into a nature reserve, attached to trees, fit only for the birds.

Secondly, it’s a comment on the style of birdhouses. While I’m sure very few people care about why birdhouses are usually modeled after cute little cabins or cottages, constructing birdhouses out of the exact opposite–a bunch of dictator palaces–makes us think about our normal birdhouse design: the country cabin full of friendly little animals, and why we consistently use that model in miniature. It’s kind of like making a child’s dollhouse in the form of a prison, in order to make us wonder about the ubiquity of the tiny little 3-level Victorian when it comes to that segment of the market.

Finally, it’s just fun design, taking these overbearing examples of state power, wrapping them around trees, and waiting for a series of little birdies to come along and make them into a home. If you’re up near the King’s Wood conservation area, check them out.

All photos are by London Fieldworks 2008. Their official text is here:

SUPER KINGDOM can be viewed as a social engineering experiment for animals – a new community in the making referencing despot’s palaces, gated community developments such as Alphaville in Brazil and the fortified exclusivity afforded to the wealthy and super-rich – all designed to keep urban reality at bay.

London Fieldworks propose SUPER KINGDOM as a series of site-specific interventions within the ancient woodland environment of Kings Wood, Challock in SE Kent for exhibition in autumn 2008 and will include the construction of show homes for animals. The show homes will be available for animal occupancy and will also function as a film set for a new video and animation work to be shot over winter 2008/9 for exhibition in spring 2009.

Considered as an enclave, a demarcated and protected area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, King’s Wood is an environment surrounded by encroaching urban development. Desire for new housing and increased local infrastructure is pitted against fears that the Stour Valley will be ecologically damaged by the unprecedented growth planned for nearby Ashford. The environmental ramifications of massive new development in the ecologically sensitive Thames Gateway are also a concern. This contention has focussed interest on the parallel story of changing habitat and shifting animal populations in King’s Wood, within the larger context of mass migration, porous borders and current speculation that for the first time the world’s urban population is about to outnumber its rural one. .

SUPER KINGDOM is a Stour Valley Arts commission supported by Arts Council England, Henry Moore Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Council and London Southbank University in collaboration with Consarc architects, Webb Yates Engineers and Setsquare Staging Limited.

Los Angeles-based Gallery 1988 has opened up a new exhibit in which pre-existing works are given a new life by contemporary illustrators (ok then, this is officially a trend). It’s called Cover Band.

This time instead of designing entirely new film posters, the artists were given the actual vinyl copy of a classic album and asked to paint, draw, or somehow design over top of it. Over 50 records were altered as as result.

What differentiates this exhibition from any silly old online gallery of photoshop fun is the basic use of physical materials. Designing directly onto the LP meant no software tricks could be (reasonably) employed, and real art equipment could be used. Some of the results even have three dimensional elements to them, like the cover for Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, which has a miniature window sculpted onto the front of it.

Not every cover is a bona fide winner–there are some that just seem like routine pieces of trendy illustration tacked on, and others for which I’m at a loss to understand how the illustration fits (or contrasts with, or does anything useful with) the original album art. But there are a lot of covers, and among them are several worth mentioning:

This Velvet Underground LP reminds me of those Penguin Deluxe comic-book editions I love so much. Sure, you can whine about altering Andy Warhol’s classic cover, but then none of us would have any fun.

Here, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme gets that nautical treatment it’s always been crying out for.

Ah, Simon & Garfunkel. While it’s not perfect, any cover that features an elegant looking bird in a trenchcoat and collared shirt standing in front of Paul Simon is a cover that speaks to me.

Not content with Morrissey being just a plain old quarry, he’s now several additional things. I really like this one–it’s a full transformation of the original cover that works entirely on its own. This one is actually done by Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy.

Famed magazine editor Tina Brown has launched The Daily Beast, a new aggregator, blog, and news website. Falling into the niche popularized by The Huffington Post but less partisan, the site aims to be a one-stop source for several things: politics, media news, gossip, photography, and various hand-picked links to other sites.

Using the slogan “read this skip that”, the main draw is the caliber of the site’s contributors, and its large and well-read staff, who carefully select and distill the day’s must-read stories.

The site is divided into a few key categories: “Cheat Sheet” is a kind of RSS feed reader in miniature, pulling together the top 15-or-so stories worth clicking through to. There’s a useful, flashy “xtra insight” section on the side which adds more context to each story (often a youtube link).

Then there’s the “Big Fat Story“, which is presumably something the editors believe will dominate that day’s news cycle. The Daily Beast uses a reasonably clear system to lay out various opinions on said issue of the day, complete with a mouse-over preview that lets you read a sufficient amount without being overloaded by the text of six articles all at once.

There’s also the “Buzz Board“, which is where the connections and cash of Brown (and Barry Diller, the site’s backer) make themselves known. These are big-name, small-blog contributions from people like Arianna Huffington, Christiane Amanpour, and Bill Clinton, and besides the storied reputation of Brown herself, are what’s drawing most of the site’s hype this week.

By default, this corner of the page is the most interesting. Initially I thought it was annoying that these big-name figures had only a micro-blog format with which to contribute, but now I’m thinking it’s ideal. I definitely don’t need to read a full article by, say, Eric Idle, and Bill Clinton’s prose isn’t something I need to digest at length, either. His three economy-related book recommendations are just fine.

There’s no question Brown is a talented curator of talent, but her unashamed attention to celebrity can still be slightly jarring. When cover stories about Jennifer Lopez’s potential nervous breakdown–6 years ago–are put right next to some serious work on the financial crisis, something seems off. But this is Brown’s modus operandi, after all–she knows even the most self-serious of us can hungrily consume a piece of gossip journalism, and she embeds it within a high-brow context: read it here and move on, she suggests, instead of buying US Weekly and feeling bad about it later.

As for the style, she tells paidcontent.org’s Staci D. Kramer:

“I’ve always loved the look of the European smart tabloids—La Republica., El Pais … There ‘s a lot to be said for the sex appeal of the tabloid flavor but then incorporating into that really terrific writing and good thinking. In some ways, it’s that high-low mix that I’ve liked to do at Vanity Fair and everywhere I’ve gone really, where the visual presentation is exciting and enticing and the content is smart and well-written and upscale.”

And the eternal question: Why should I visit you when there’s already Slate/Drudge/Huffington Post/TPM/Google News and every other magazine and newspaper?” Brown’s characteristic answer: “Sensibility, darling.”

As for some thoughts from the comptetition, the Times helps us out:

“The design is lively,” said Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media. But, he added, citing Google’s home page, among others, “it has to be simpler to work.”

Amid much fanfare opens the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City’s Columbus Circle. Until 2002 this museum was called the American Craft Museum, but that name was too much glue-and-sparkles or old-furniture for a fickle youngster like me, and probably for most of the people who might be drawn towards what’s actually inside the building. Hence the re-branding.

Having just opened, they’ve launched their inaugural exhibition, called Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary. It’s a series of 50 exhibitions that refashion a bunch of materials into new pieces. From what I can gather this isn’t any kind of large-scale statement on recycling material or the terrible vagaries of consumption, which is a welcome approach. It’s far better to treat the show as art first, and allow the social implications of the work to rise up from the viewer’s response, rather than having it spelled out as an overarching (and thus slightly boring) theme.

But check out fine art critic Roberta Smith’s review of the show in the New York Times:

There is a simplistic political thrust to a lot of this work, but environmental sensitivity is mostly nil. Some questions for the artists here are: Thought about your carbon footprint lately? Are more iterations of this tired Surrealist idea needed? Are you really giving the objects you’re using a second life, or just enabling them to last longer and take up more space?

If I’m reading her right, she’s asking that any exhibit with a “simplistic political thrust” at least deal, using a modicum of subtlety, with a top political issue of the day. If you’re going to call your exhibit Second Lives and make other political points with it, at least say something smart about the environment, she suggests. The museum, on the other hand, says that “while the focus of the exhibition is neither on sustainability nor recycling, the works in the exhibition are a catalyst for thought and discussion about these issues.”

Now reading, talking, and doing things about consumption/carbon footprints/etc is a heavy, important thing for all of us to pay big amounts of attention to, but when art exhibitions are yoked into the service of environmental concerns as their primary raison-d’etre, something is lost in the process. Being virtuous and thinking morally about the environment are beautiful things, but I have yet to be convinced they’re ideal frameworks for an art exhibition. There’s still time to change my mind, but for now I like the museum’s subtle approach.

And besides, Smith’s final verdict? “I recommend a visit.”

Some of the more notable exhibits on show include:

Trinity: Grandma, Spike, Bubbles (2007) by American artists Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth. These custom chromed chandeliers are designed in traditional neoclassical form, but are made of hypodermic needles, gelatin capsules and Swarovski crystal which reflect drug culture themes. While seductive in their beauty, the chandeliers are a chilling reminder of a darker side of contemporary life.  (from the museum’s website; photo credit: Schroeder Romero)

There are also a couple that are just straight-up aesthetically pleasing to gawk at. They also both happen to be made of vinyl, which might explain my attraction. One is shown above–Paul Villinski’s My Back Pages, in which his records take off and fly away as a series of butterflies. It’s good. The other, “Sound Wave” by Jean Shin (check out the Times for the photo) is a giant wave molded out of old records.

If you’re in New York City soon, stop by–you’ll see a load of original design in a wonderful space. Smith says “the opening displays, it must be granted, reflect an institution that is wild with delight at having for the first time a real museum building of its very own.”

An additional note: the MAD acronym and entire re-branding campaign was done by the famous Pentagram agency, who have a great blog post on the big spread of work they’ve done for the launch.

You’ve probably experienced “Urban Interventionism” without knowing it. Falling under the rubric of “activist art”, it’s the kind of art installation that attempts to directly involve the audience, often constituted as passers-by on the street. Usually designed as an interruption in the urban fabric, this is socially active art that changes public spaces into temporary art galleries on what can seem like an improvisational basis.

In this vein, the Amsterdam-based Droog agency has just launched Urban Play along a portion of that city’s riverfront. Featuring works by “some of the most notorious urban interventionists,” the work actively encourages public participation/documentation by the public. Under the banner of the larger ExperimentaDesign Biennale currently running through the 2nd of November in both Amsterdam and Utrecht, the exhibit is one of the few times in which so many of these artists, together, have a legal and comissioned forum of expression. At least I think it’s legal. (update: some people are confused)

Reversing the traditional approach to urban design, in which objects and areas are created explicitly to discourage public interaction and intervention, this collection of objects will be created to encourage interaction and physical engagement by the public.

At first I thought the idea of bringing together a group of artists like this actually ran counter to my preconceived notions of what Urban Interventionism means, but rather than being subversive for the sake of it, most of the artists and their respective work simply operate outside the normal “channels” of the art world–no funding, no authorization, just creative expression with the specific intent of altering urban spaces.

While some social attitudes have previously dismissed urban intervention as a form of vandalism, at the heart of this current wave of DIY urban design is in fact a deeply sophisticated movement driven by artists and designers who want to expand our relationship between creativity and the city.

Besides, the exhibition strives to ask a series of questions about art in the city, questions like “can a city tolerate its residents interacting with it in alternative ways?” or “what is the limit of urban intervention?” And the legal status of all the Amsterdam installations is (intentionally?) left unclear, meaning some of the exhibits might test the city’s limits in untold ways–these people don’t get casually labelled “pranksters” by local governments for nothing, after all.

After the exhibition in Amsterdam, Urban Play will continue on to other various European cities. I’ve only ever experienced Urban Interventionism second-hand, through newspaper articles, design sites, and various recountings. While collecting a series of these city-mods together might take away some of the experience of stumbling upon an “intervention” at random, I’ll gladly trade a touch of spontaneity to see so many designers at work in what is undoubtedly the new direction in street art.

From small interventions such as a series of stickers that turn the London Underground’s Northern Line map into an interactive game to bold projects that transform chain-link fences in Chicago into public message boards, these actions fall outside of traditional notions of urban activity, and are quickly relegated to the margins, often labeled as subversive, underground, or even illegal. Urban Play is an international project that believes this street-level inventiveness, energy and innovation is a window into a new form of creativity in the city.

The Design Museum of London is launching a new exhibition in a few days. It’s called Design Cities, and it takes a unique approach to exhibiting a period of design: it focuses on the history of several moments and their associated cities. Far from just showing what group of designers happened to come from which place, the exhibit will “investiage the tangible link between design and the city and will celebrate the key achievements of this relationship.”

The exhibition will feature a full range of objects from textiles and fashion to industrial pieces, furniture and prints. It will include design classics such as chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, as well as work by a spectrum of designers that together will evoke an impression of their era. Key exhibits will include work by William Morris, Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Achille Castiglioni, Ettore Sottsass, Gio Ponti, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Paul Smith, Ron Arad, Zaha Hadid and Ross Lovegrove.

I think it’s useful to look back to a period when cities did draw certain types of designers, when certain sets of studios worked together, or in a common environment, and created something entirely of the time and place–not only because some of those design results were both spectacular and particular, but also because that kind of metropolitan-based cohesion is something largely impossible these days.

The exhibition starts by going back to London in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition, the embodiment of high tech, and prefabrication that was both admired, and abhorred in its time. It ends with the London of today, a city that is once again a global centre for design of all kinds. Between the two, the exhibition focuses on six cities, Vienna, just before World War One, when the language of modernity first started to take shape, then Dessau, the small town in Germany that built the Bauhaus, the most famous school of design the world has ever seen. Paris in the 1930s was the city that became the capital of visual culture, where both Picasso and Le Corbusier made their homes.

Today’s inability to find this kind of cohesion isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way it is. I’m not saying modern cities have lost all their character, far from it–just that the specific aesthetic coming from a city tends to shelter itself under the globalised design world, especially when approached from an online perspective. When I see a chair, a website, a product, anything–one of the last things I associate it with is a city or a specific place.

Sure, you might spot a cultural signpost embedded somewhere in the design (the kind of things that make you say “oh, that looks vaguely Japanese” without really being able to explain much past that), but the give and take of a network society makes it virtually impossible for me to see a product and say “oh yeah, Italian-made all the way.”

The exhibition continues into the post war years and Los Angeles, where Charles Eames built his supremely elegant studio and house was the epitome of the American century. In the 1960s, leadership in contemporary design moved to Milan. And in the 1980s Tokyo made its presence felt, moving beyond the moral certainty of European industrial design, toward a more playful approach. Finally, returning to present day London which is once again the world’s leading centre for design, the base for Ron Arad and Ross Lovegrove, Jasper Morrison and many other leading contemporary designers.

That’s why I’m intensely interested to see the last, ultra-contemporary part of this exhibition, which returns its focus to London: many of the leading contemporary designers are based there at the moment, but is there any kind of specific “London” style of the moment? I doubt it.

London is often recognized as the most cosmopolitan of the world’s cities, and it’s this interconectedness that draws the design world’s leading lights there–the city has more contemporary art installations, innovative designers, and advertising agencies than anywhere (I could write the same sentence about New York, too), but the heyday of “British” design as any kind of relevant force outside of the retro world is largely irrelevant. Thus the return to London as the final destination of the museum’s grand tour leaves me curious to see if today’s “London Style” has anything, really, to do with London at all.

The exhibition runs until January 14th, 2009.

64 designers, 109 works, 7 brand names, 12 products
•     London; Christopher Dresser, Owen Jones, Willam Morris, Joseph Paxton (1851)

•     Vienna; Joseph Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Koloman Moser, Michael Thonet, Janke Urban, Otto Wagner (1908)

•     Dessau; Marcel Breuer, Lena Mayer-Bregner, Wilhelm Wagenfeld (1928)

•     Paris; Le Corbusier, Jeanneret Pierre, Charlotte Perriand, Eileen Gray, René Herbst, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Jean Prouvé, Citroen  (1931)

•     Los Angeles; Saul Bass, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Elliot Noyes, Eero Saarinen, Ford (1949)

•     Milano; Corradino D’Ascanio, Mario Bellini, Achille Castiglioni, Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Joe Colombo, Perry King, Paolo Lomazzi, Vico Magistretti, Angelo Mangiarotti, Bruno Munari, Marcello Nizzoli, Gionatan De Pas, Giovanni Pintori, Gio Ponti, Richard Sapper, Carla Scolari, Ettore Sottsass, Marco Zanuso, Donato d’Urbino (1957)

•     Tokyo; Nigel Coates, Shiro Kuramata, Canon, Olympus, Sharp, Sony (1987)

•     Londra; Ron Arad, Barber Osberby, Hussein Chalayan, David Chipperfield, Tom Dixon, Fernando Guiterrez, Zaha Hadid, Industrial Facility, Ross  Lovegrove, Jasper Morrison, Ross Phillips, Peter Saville, Paul Barnes, Smith, Paul Smith, Mini (2008)