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February 22, 2010
 

Sunday Reading

Posted by Steffen Böddeker 

What makes a good exhibition website? On MoMA’s blog Inside/Out Senior Media Developer, Digital Media Shannon Darrough interviews web designer Yugo Nakamura, who designed the site for MoMA’s 2008 Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. The interview is brief and Nakamura’s spare comments don’t reveal too much about his working process, but he does make an important point about a core challenge in designing exhibition websites:

“We first thought about the two functions the website needed to cover. One was that the website itself became a form of creative expression that follows the theme of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. The other was to make sure that it also functioned as an informational website.”

Etb-9_moma-datem-1

What I love about that website is how it captures the curatorial spirit of the exhibition without relying on the show’s physical presentation. This allows the site to exist online in its own time, with tremendous relevance long after the exhibition is deinstalled. The site packs in a huge amount of content (more entries than the exhibition itself), and makes a complex network of relationships beautifully visible. The hard facts about the exhibition are found only in the exhibition archive on the main MoMA site.

Etb-9_moma-datem-2

Yesterday was the deadline for submissions to the Museums and the Web 2010 Best of the Web competition. (See the list of entries here.) I will take a closer look at the nominees in the coming days. In the exhibition category, we'll have to see which sites manage to become a form of creative expression following the theme of the exhibition while still functioning as an informational tool. Among the submissions is MoMA’s more recent website for Gabriel Orozco, designed by Shannon Darrough inhouse. I’m a little torn about that one. It is amazing to have images of the entire show online, including notebook pages - a full deck of “playing cards”. But there is something limiting about treating each work as an equal image; online I get a sense of homogeneity that is not at all the case in Orozco’s actual work. I like that the primary navigation is intuitive browsing by associated works, but I wish that the relationships connecting these works was more apparent - as they are on Design and the Elastic Mind. 

Etb-9_moma-orozco

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