NEW YORK.- The National Design Triennial is an ongoing exhibition series at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Inaugurated in 2000, the Triennial seeks out and presents the most innovative American designs from the prior three years in a variety of fields, including product design, architecture, furniture, film, graphics, new technologies, animation, science, medicine and fashion.

On view throughout the museum campus will be the work of 87 designers and firms, ranging from established design leaders such as Apple, architect Santiago Calatrava and Nike, Inc., to emerging designers like Joshua Davis, Jason Miller and David Wiseman. “Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006,” made possible by Target, will be on view from Dec. 8 through July 29, 2007.

Cooper-Hewitt curators Barbara Bloemink, Ellen Lupton and Matilda McQuaid, along with guest curator Brooke Hodge of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, will present the experimental projects, emerging ideas, major buildings, new products and media that were at the center of contemporary culture from 2003 to 2006. The curatorial team chose the designers and firms by group consensus, and, for the first time, collected nominations from the public through a blog-style Web site, which brought in nominations for designers and firms such as Electroland, Nicholas Blechman, SHoP and Marsha Ginsberg. “By displaying side-by-side the latest products and creative concepts from companies as diverse as Pixar, Google, Herman Miller and NASA, the Triennial emphasizes the nearly infinite ways in which design plays a role in how we see, think about and experience the world around us,” said museum director Paul Warwick Thompson. “The Triennial exhibition, catalog and related educational programming all advance Cooper-Hewitt’s mission to increase the public understanding of the impact of design on daily life.”

“Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006” will focus on four principal ideas that characterized elements of the design world during the last three years: emulating life; community; hand-crafted and do-it-yourself design; and transformation.

Emulating Life - The exhibition will highlight designs that emulate the natural world—either through form or movement—from game design to robotics to products like kayaks and sneakers. Many new designs are based on biomimicry, studying the appearance and form of natural organisms in order to replicate various processes and functions.

In the process of designing the Nike Free running shoe, Nike designers explored the physiognomy of the human foot to try to emulate in a shoe the range of motion that occurs in the toes and feet when running barefoot. Joseph Ayers’ Robolobster, intended to recognize changes in seawater and locate underwater mines, is a robotic crustacean whose structure and form replicates its living counterpart. Graham Hawkes’ Deep Flight submersible can fly through the water like a greatbodied sea creature, through a design process which began with motion studies and engineering.

Apple’s iPod also displays nature’s characteristics of rapid mutation and change: it only functions when customized by individual users, it can continually expand its functions, and its designs are adaptive, from the basic iPod to the iPod Video.

Recently, robotics has moved from industrial and scientific tasks to the home, through affordable robots ranging from toys such as Wowwee’s Robosapien to domestic assistants such as iRobot’s Roomba and Scooba cleaning devices. David Hanson has gone one step further, by creating robots that uncannily mimic human behavior, expressions and appearance. Hanson’s robotic head of Albert Einstein features highly realistic, responsive, skin-like “Frubber” and artificial intelligence components that enable the robot to answer questions with extremely realistic and subtle facial expressions. Similarly, Sergeant Blackwell, a three-dimensional virtual character developed for military training exercises by the Institute for Creative Technologies, is able to visually track movement, answer unscripted questions and display different emotional states.

Community - The Triennial will demonstrate how design has responded to the growth and dissemination of the Internet, which has led to the evolution of vast communities that interact across enormous distances via blogs, film and animation, graphic design, limited-edition toys and music. Blogs give voice to everything from political views to the personal musings of teenagers. Design blogs, such as Armin Vit’s SpeakUp, create an online community shaped by its authors, readers and contributors. Through a computer terminal installed in the Triennial exhibition, visitors will have an opportunity to see the visual possibilities of the blogging medium.

Design has always been a collaborative effort, involving clients, fabricators, retailers and end users, but increasingly, designers are working to collaborate in more fundamental ways. For its landscape projects, Field Operations integrates art, architecture, ecology, urbanism and economic development, as evidenced in its master plan for the University of Puerto Rico Botanical Garden.

Likewise, in the creation of Teardrop Park, Michael Van Valkenburgh formed a temporary community of artists, civic officials and studio associates.

In the workplace, Herman Miller’s New Office Landscape series aims to stimulate employee creativity by creating semi-enclosed areas, such as the Basket group seating area, that are inviting places to meet, network and brainstorm. This new office environment proposes larger, more flexible shared areas mixed with smaller individual office spaces, designed to break up the grid of the old cube system and foster better collaboration.