Profit and Gloss

Only a Few Stars Sparkle at Design Triennial

NEW YORK -- There's an impressive trade fair now on in uptown Manhattan. Designers from every walk of life are showing off the latest in high-end product.

There's a splashy display about the sleek interiors of the new Boeing Dreamliner passenger jet: "For the first time in aviation history, the airplane has been redesigned with the passenger's comfort in mind," says a gushy text nearby.

There's fashion built around pared-down, "futuristic" shapes straight out of the 1960s, flatware that looks like something from a Klingon battle cruiser, circa 1979, and a system of giant sci-fi lighting panels that turn on as you walk by them up the stairs. (A bank of cooling fans, tucked out of sight, gives some idea of how much energy the lighting units use -- or waste -- just to get us up a staircase.)

This trade fair isn't at a convention center, and it's not -- at least officially -- organized by industry. (Though it is sponsored by Target.) It's at the Cooper-Hewitt, the Smithsonian's museum of applied and decorative arts. It's called "Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006."

It might as well be called "Cool Stuff That Sells." Many of its 87 projects don't question the design world's status quo or move beyond it. They just rehash the slick lines of modern design -- now almost 100 years old -- to make another consumer product for us to buy, then throw away when something newer comes along. "When we think of 'design objects,' " writes co-curator Brooke Hodge in her catalogue essay, "many of us think of things that are sleek, smooth, sensual and perfect." But she and her three colleagues don't do all that much to push back against such habits or to deter designers who encourage them.

The Triennial doesn't seem to offer any kind of take on what might matter in today's design, or a view toward some new future for it. It feels like an evenhanded survey of what happens to be out there and is currently hot.

The show includes the animated figures of Pixar. And the iPod, in all its incarnations. And the latest "space-age" office chair that, like so many of its predecessors, claims to be uniquely suited to the human form. And there's also a recent running shoe from Nike: The "Free 5.0" may -- or more likely, may not -- be the absolutely final word in bipedal locomotion. But do Boeing, Pixar, Apple and Nike really need a museum's help to spread word of their designs?

The exhibition also presents a few objects that depend less on style than on performing important functions well: a storage unit for transplant organs, NASA's Mars rover, a new kind of underwater "plane."

Yet can a design museum afford to celebrate pure, style-free function? To the extent that the designers of the Triennial's organ box or submersible flier care at all about the way they look -- why should they? -- they never escape from the cliched gloss of "modern" design.

To have a mission that makes any kind of sense, the Cooper-Hewitt has to be about the coming together of form and function. It has to be about objects whose new looks give them a new role to play, or whose designers have new ways of doing and thinking that come across in how the objects look.

Here are a few of this Triennial's truly winning designs that do just that.

Barking Up a Green Tree

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Natalie Jeremijenko performs surgery of a sort on toys to create robotic "dogs" with a social agenda: Sniffing out pollutants.(Emily Nathan - Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum)

Natalie Jeremijenko, from the art department of the University of California at San Diego, takes the essentially functionless robot animals sold in toy stores and turns them into what she calls Feral Robotic Dogs. By reverse-engineering the toys -- doing "some gentle amputation," she says, to lower their centers of gravity, giving them a touch of brain surgery, adding on a new artificial "nose" -- she gets them to sniff out polluting gases in the environment. Jeremijenko teaches high school students to strip off all the decorative gunk that the toys' original designers saddled their robots with, and to turn them into mean machines with a green mission -- motorized Saint Bernards out to save our century.