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Message Exhibition Curation IDEO Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection (June 22, 2007-January 20, 2008) is the sixth installment in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s Nancy and Edwin Marks Gallery. Guest-curated by IDEO, the exhibition features more than 30 objects organized under the rubric of “design thinking”—a timeless, inherently human approach to problem-solving focused on improving what already exists and creating what does not. The exhibition objects range from the 16th century to the present, and despite their diversity of intent, media and context, reveal a shared story about the ways in which the designer is called upon to solve everyday problems. The selection includes flashlights from the 1940s through the 1990s, whose diversity show the various ways designers approached the need for portable lighting; the Corning Glass Works glass-bodied “Silver Streak” iron (early 1940s), developed for the domestic market during wartime rationing of metals; a child’s chair (ca. 1944), by Charles and Ray Eames, one of the first mass-produced, molded plywood furniture designs; and a woodcut (1506-1507) with a “knot” pattern, presumably for use on embroidery, pottery, or etched glass, from a series of six designed by Albrecht Durer. In addition to designing the exhibition’s spatial layout and visitor journey, IDEO created a series of texts and graphics that encourage visitors to examine the objects through three lenses: inspiration, intuition, and empathy. These lenses were chosen to foster an understanding of the design thinker, their work, and the context in which it was created. http://www.ideo.com/work/exhibition-curation