NEW YORK.- The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum presents Solos: Matali Crasset on view until September 24, 2006. In the fourth installment of the Solos exhibition series, Cooper-Hewitt presents an interactive light and sound installation by the celebrated French industrial designer Matali Crasset. Crasset’s work explores residential and urban rituals and the domestication of technology, comprising industrial design products, graphics, theater sets, wallpaper, and furniture.

The Solos series was launched in 2003 to showcase innovations in the fields of architecture and design, including designs new to the market or to construction or new design in the research and development stage.

Crasset encourages us to pose such questions in everything she designs. Born into a farming family in the French village of Normée, near Châlons-en-Champagne in 1965, she discovered design when studying marketing at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris and immediately changed courses. After graduating in 1991 she worked for the designer Denis Santachiara in Milan and returned to Paris in 1993 to work for Philippe Starck, first in his own studio and then at the Thomson Multimedia electronics group.

Having continued to develop her own projects alongside her work for Starck, Crasset opened her own studio in Paris in 1998. She now works across a wide range of disciplines on mass-manufactured furniture and electronic products, experimental projects such as Phytolab for Dornbracht and architectural commissions including HI Hotel in Nice and a capsule house for pigeons.