Designing for Safety

Designing for Safety

Safe: Design Takes on Risk, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 16 October 2005–2 January 2006

Four years after 9/11, more than two years after the invasion of Iraq, and just weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened an exhibit titled Safe: Design Takes on Risk. Its timing lent the exhibit a particular resonance. Safe featured devices designed to provide protection from physical dangers and psychological anxieties. In a world preoccupied with terrorism, AIDS, war, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, identity theft, crime, and a host of other calamities, as well as nighttime fears, it was sure to draw crowds. ¹

Its broad conceptual framework made Safe both fascinating and frustrating. The "risks" ranged from the catastrophic to the mundane. There was a bullet-resistant face mask and an electronic device to check for bad breath before a kiss. Mine detectors and smoke hoods shared space with objects like the PowerPizza, a fake paper pizza box intended to camouflage the laptop computer inside. Many devices were deftly designed to protect against various natural and man-made dangers. The Global Village Shelter, for example, which helped reconstruction efforts after Hurricane Ivan in Grenada in 2004, is a sturdy wind- and fire-resistant paper house (fig. 1) that snaps together in fifteen minutes and lasts twelve months. For everyday urban angst, meanwhile, there was the Karryfront Screamer bag, a laptop bag that emits a 138-decibel screech if grabbed by a would-be thief.

In the end, the objects themselves, not the conceptual framework, were this exhibit's strength. Safe was organized around six categories: armor, emergency, awareness, shelter, everyday, and property. This scheme worked fairly well, though at times the categories seemed too arbitrary and broad. "Armor," for instance, turned out to have wide-ranging meanings—not only face guards, but also an innovative condom that can be unwrapped and fitted in three seconds. Protective armor for individuals, such as chemical-resistant booties, was interspersed with such niche items as a freestanding crowd-control barrier to protect performers at rock concerts. The "emergency" category was more coherent and featured items chosen for being functional, efficient, sturdy, light, and easily understandable and deployable: a cardiac defibrillator for home use, hand-cranked, battery-powered radios and cell-phone chargers, blizzard-survival kits. In the catalog, exhibit curator Paola Antonelli writes that "the study of emergency equipment was the spark for this exhibition and catalogue, not surprisingly since objects designed for emergency use are the epitome of good functional design." ²

In the "everyday" category (which could easily have included the condoms), one encountered a specially designed Tylenol bottle as well as the Nido (fig. 2), a concept car designed to protect its occupants in a collision with a larger, heavier vehicle. It featured a protective rigid cell housing passengers

and driver, a "sled" that slid forward in an accident and dissipated impact, and deformable absorbers made of honeycomb sections. "Awareness" included graphic designs for informational signs, such as tsunami warnings and airplane safety cards, while "property" included some of the exhibit's more conceptually interesting designs, including prototypes of identity cards containing samples of one's blood and hair—samples, said the exhibit label, that thieves would find it useless to steal—and the INVERSAbrane invertible building membrane, which filters out pollutants and allergens, collects rainwater for daily use, and harnesses solar energy.

The "shelter" category highlighted the exhibit's strategy of mixing the serious and the sardonic, the political and the practical. To tweak cities for...