Article from Art in America, by Sarah Hromack and Rob Giampietro
ROB GIAMPIETRO is principal at Project Projects, a design studio in New York.
SARAH HROMACK is director of digital media at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Two experts assess the impact of digital media and new design on today’s cultural institutions:

“It’s no longer a question of whether art institutions should have a virtual presence. Rather, the onus is being placed on designers to facilitate meaningful interactions with art that might occur in the gallery, via Web-based applications or in new hybrid spaces that merge the real and the virtual. Any attempt to augment an encounter with artwork using technological means invariably raises questions about the values we assign to certain modes of viewing. After all, isn’t visiting a museum inherently tied to a very deep, very primary real-life experience? The promises and pitfalls of new technologies are forcing museums to rebalance their traditional mandates to care for a collection of physical objects while enabling scholarship and providing the wider public an opportunity to engage with works of art. “—R.G. and S.H.

In his 1955 book Designing for People, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss was one of the first to write of designing a “man-machine interface”—in that case, a more accessible cockpit for pilots in WWII. By applying techniques from the emerging fields of ergonomics and information theory, Dreyfuss and his team aimed to integrate controls, seating and instrumentation in order to close the gap between a pilot and his aircraft. Like the full-room scale of the first mainframe computers, the cockpit subsumed its human operator—it was an interface that was also an environment, operating at the scale of architecture.

Henry Dreyfuss: “Basic Visual Data,” from the book The Measure of Man, Human Factors in Design, 1959

In the same book, Dreyfuss turns his attention from the hard lessons of war to the soft power of culture, evoking another bit of architecture that might be reshaped by the new logic of the interface: the museum.

“A half-hour’s tour through a museum with a TV camera,” he wrote, “can bring to life a wealth of art and knowledge that could otherwise not be seen in months.”1

Once again Dreyfuss was aiming to close a gap, to give people immediate access to all the world’s artwork. Paradoxically, his scheme for facilitating this immediacy required the mediating device of broadcast television.

To read the full conversation between Sarah Hromack and Rob Giampietro, click here to see the full article over at Art in America.