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I'm almost like a crazy evangelical.

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I've always known that the age of design is upon us,

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almost like a rapture.

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If the day is sunny, I think,

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"Ooh, the gods have had a good design day."

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Or, I go to a show and I see a beautiful piece by an artist,

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particularly beautiful, I say

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he's so good because he clearly looked to design

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to understand what he needed to do.

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So I really do believe that design

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is the highest form of creative expression.

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That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design,

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and the age of design is the age in which design

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is still cute furniture, is still posters,

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is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today.

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But in truth, what I really would like to explain

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to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that

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the most interesting chairs are the ones

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that are actually made by a robot,

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like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij,

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where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur

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of recycled refrigerator parts,

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as if he were a big candy, and makes a chair out of it.

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Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time

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and that become part of our identity.

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I want people to understand

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that design is so much more than cute chairs,

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that it is first and foremost everything that is around us

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in our life.

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And it's interesting how so much of what we're talking about

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tonight is not simply design but interaction design.

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And in fact, interaction design is what I've been trying

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to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art

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for a few years, starting not very timidly

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but just pointedly with works, for instance,

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by Martin Wattenberg -- the way a machine

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plays chess with itself, that you see here,

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or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners, the Sugar interface

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for One Laptop Per Child,

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Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On musical instruments,

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and Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters,

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and John Maeda's Reactive Books,

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and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's I Want You To Want Me.

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These were some of the first acquisitions that really

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introduced the idea of interaction design to the public.

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But more recently, I've been trying really to go even deeper

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into interaction design with examples

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that are emotionally really suggestive

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and that really explain interaction design at a level

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that is almost undeniable.

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The Wind Map, by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas,

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I don't know if you've ever seen it -- it's really fantastic.

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It looks at the territory of the United States

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as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds

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and that is really giving you a pictorial image

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of what's going on with the winds in the United States.

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But also, more recently, we started acquiring video games,

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and that's where all hell broke loose

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in a really interesting way. (Laughter)

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There are still people that believe that there's a high and there's a low.

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And that's really what I find so intriguing

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about the reactions that we've had to the annointment

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of video games in the MoMA collection.

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We've -- No, first of all, New York Magazine always gets it.

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I love them. So we are in the right quadrant.

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We are in the Highbrow -- that's daring, that's courageous --

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and Brilliant, which is great.

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Timidly, we've been higher on the diagonal in other situations,

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but it's okay. It's good. It's good. It's good. (Laughter)

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But here comes the art critic. Oh, that was fantastic.

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So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian.

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"Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art."

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Did I ever say they were art? I was talking about interaction design. Excuse me.

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"Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh" --

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They're two floors away. (Laughter) —

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"will mean game over for any real understanding of art."

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I'm bringing in the end of the world. You know?

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We were talking about the rapture? It's coming.

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And Jonathan Jones is making it happen.

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So the same Guardian rebuts,

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"Are video games art: the debate that shouldn't be.

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Last week, Guardian art critic blah blah suggested

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that games cannot qualify as art. But is he right?

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And does it matter?" Thank you. Does it matter?

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You know, it's like once again there's this whole problem

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of design being often misunderstood for art,

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or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to

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aspire to, would like to be called, artists.

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No. Designers aspire to be really great designers.

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Thank you very much. And that's more than enough.

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So my knight in shining armor, John Maeda,

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without any prompt, came out with this big declaration

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on why video games belong in the MoMA.

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And that was fantastic. And I thought that was it.

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But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article

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that came out in The New Republic, so pretentious,

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by Liel Leibovitz, and it said, "MoMA has mistaken video games for art." Again.

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"The museum is putting Pac-Man alongside Picasso." Again.

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"That misses the point."

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Excuse me. You're missing the point.

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And here, look, the above question is put bluntly:

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"Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art

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because they are quite thoroughly something else: code."

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Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right?

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So it's so fantastic to see

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how these feathers that were ruffled,

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and these reactions, were so vehement.

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And you know what?

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The International Cat Video Film Festival

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didn't have that much of a reaction. (Laughter)

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I think this was truly fantastic.

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We were talking about dancing ponies, but I was really jealous

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of the Walker Arts Center for putting up this festival,

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because it's very, very wonderful.

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And there's this Flaubert quote that I love:

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"I have always tried to live in an ivory tower,

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but a tide of shit is beating at its walls,

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threatening to undermine it."

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I consider myself the tide of shit.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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You know, we have to go through that.

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Even in the 1930s, my colleagues

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that were trying to put together an abstract art show

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had all of these works stopped by the customs officers

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that decided they were not art.

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So it's happened before, and it will happen in the future,

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but right now I can tell you that I am so, so proud

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to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection.

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And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one.

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And you know, the amount of work --

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yeah, Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government

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and that's how he developed Tetris,

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and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game

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and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube

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that makes it look slightly bombed.

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And it's fantastic.

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So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work,

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because we're still the Museum of Modern Art,

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so even when we tackle popular culture,

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we tackle it as a form of interaction design

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and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA,

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therefore, has to be researched.

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So to get to choosing Eric Chahi's

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wonderful Another World, amongst others,

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we put together a panel of experts,

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and we worked on this acquisition,

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and it's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway.

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We worked on it for a year and a half.

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So many people helped us — designers of games,

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you might know Jamin Warren

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and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine,

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and you know, Kevin Slavin. You name it.

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We bugged everybody, because we knew that we were ignorant.

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We were not real gamers enough,

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so we had to really talk to them.

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And so we decided, of course, to have Sim City 2000,

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not the other Sim City, that one in particular,

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so the criteria that we developed along the way

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were really strong, and were not only criteria of selection.

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They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation.

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That's what makes this acquisition more than a little game

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or a little joke. It's truly a way to think of how to preserve

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and show artifacts that will more and more

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become part of our lives in the future.

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We live today, as you know very well, not in the digital,

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not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone

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that our mind makes of the two.

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And that's really where interaction lies,

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and that's the importance of interaction.

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And in order to explain interaction, we need to really

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bring people in and make them realize

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how interaction is part of their lives.

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So when I talk about it, I don't talk only about video games,

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which are in a way the purest form of interaction,

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unadulterated by any kind of function or finality.

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I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine,

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which I consider a masterpiece of interaction.

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I mean, that interface is beautiful.

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It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel.

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You know, with your mitt you can actually paw

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the MetroCard, and I talk about how bad

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ATM machines usually are.

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So I let people understand that it's up to them

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to know how to judge interaction

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so as to know when it's good or when it's bad.

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So when I show The Sims,

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I try to make people really feel what it meant

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to have an interaction with The Sims,

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not only the fun but also the responsibility

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that came with the Tamagotchi.

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You know, video games can be truly deep

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even when they're completely mindless.

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I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy.

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It's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can

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in a finite amount of time

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and hopefully you'll be able to make it into a planet.

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I've never made it into a planet, but that's it.

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Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States.

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It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan.

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And it was one of the first video games

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in which you could choose your own music.

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So you would put into the PlayStation,

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you would put your own CD,

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and then the game would change alongside your music. So really fantastic.

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Not to mention Eve Online.

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Eve Online is an artificial universe, if you wish,

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but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi,

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not Ambassador Stevens, but one of his collaborators,

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was a really big shot in Eve Online,

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so here you have a diplomat in the real world

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that spends his time in Eve Online

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to kind of test, maybe, all of his ideas about diplomacy

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and about universe-building, and to the point that

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the first announcement of the bombing

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was actually given on Eve Online,

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and after his death, several parts of the universe

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were named after him.

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And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival

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in Reykjavík that was quite amazing.

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I mean, we're talking about an experience

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that of course can seem weird to many,

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but that is very educational.

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Of course, there are games that are even more educational.

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Dwarf Fortress is like the holy grail

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of this kind of massive multiplayer online game,

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and in fact the two Adams brothers were in Reykjavík,

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and they were greeted

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by a standing ovation by all the Eve Online fans.

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It was amazing to see. And it's a beautiful game.

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So you start seeing here that

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the aesthetics that are so important

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to a museum collection like MoMA's

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are kept alive also by the selection of these games.

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And you know, Valve -- you know, Portal --

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is an example of a video game in which

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you have a certain type of violence

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which also leads me to talk about

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one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss

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when we acquired the video games, what to do with violence.

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Right? We had to make decisions.

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At MoMA, interestingly, there's a lot of violence

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depicted in the art part of the collection,

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but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago, and as an Italian,

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I said, "You know what, we need a Beretta."

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And I was told, "No. No guns in the design collection."

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And I was like, "Why?"

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Interestingly, I learned that it's considered

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that in design and in the design collection,

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what you see is what you get.

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So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection.

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If it's in the art collection,

252
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it might be a critique of the killing instrument.

253
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So it's very interesting.

254
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But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design,

255
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so maybe one day we'll be able to acquire also the guns.

256
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But here, in this particular case, we decided,

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you know, with Kate and Paul,

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that we would have no gratuitous violence.

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So we have Portal because you shoot walls

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in order to create new spaces.

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We have Street Fighter II, because martial arts are good.

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(Laughter)

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But we don't have GTA because,

264
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maybe it's my own reflection,

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I've never been able to do anything but crashing cars

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and shooting prostitutes and pimps.

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So it was not very constructive. (Laughter)

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So, I'm making fun of it, but we discussed this

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for so many days. You have no idea.

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And to this day, I am ambivalent,

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but when you have instead games like Flow, there's no doubt.

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It's like, it's about serenity and it's about sublime.

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It's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature.

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Then we have a few also side-scrollers -- classical ones.

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So it's quite a hefty collection.

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And right now, we started with the first 14,

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but we have several that are coming up,

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and the reason why we haven't acquired them yet

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is because you don't acquire just the game.

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You acquire the relationship with the company.

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What we want, what we aspire to, is the code.

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It's very hard to get, of course.

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But that's what would enable us to preserve

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the video games for a really long time,

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and that's what museums do.

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They also preserve artifacts for posterity.

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In absence of the code, because, you know,

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video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases,

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in absence of that, we acquire the relationship with the company.

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We're going to stay with them forever.

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They're not going to get rid of us.

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And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter)

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But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose

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for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important.

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And I'm showing you Core War here,

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which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically

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of the limitations of the processor.

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So the kind of interferences that you see here

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that look like beautiful barriers in the game

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are actually a consequence of the processor's limitedness,

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which is fantastic. So aesthetics is always important.

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And so is space, the spatial aspect of games.

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You know, I feel that the best video games

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are the ones that have really savvy architects

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that are behind them, and if they're not architects,

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bona fide trained in architecture, they have that feeling.

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But the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important.

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Time. The way we experience time in video games,

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as in other forms of interaction design,

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is really quite amazing.

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It can be real time or it can be the time within the game,

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as is in Animal Crossing, where seasons

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follow each other at their own pace.

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So time, space, aesthetics,

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and then, most important, behavior.

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The real core issue of interaction design is behavior.

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Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors

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that go to influence the rest of our lives.

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They're not just limited to our interaction with the screen.

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In this case, I'm showing you Marble Madness,

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which is a beautiful game

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in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you,

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so you have a sphere that's moving in this landscape,

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and the sphere, the controller itself, gives you a sense of the movement.

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In a way, you can see how video games

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are the purest aspect of interaction design

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and are very useful to explain what interaction is.

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We don't want to show the video games

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with the paraphernalia. No arcade nostalgia.

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If anything, we want to show the code,

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and here you see Ben Fry's distellamap of Pac-Man,

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of the Pac-Man code.

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00:15:13,520 --> 00:15:17,859
So the way we acquired the games is very interesting

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and very unorthodox. You see them here

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displayed alongside other examples of design,

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furniture and other parts,

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but there's no paraphernalia, no nostalagia,

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only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers.

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The controllers are, of course, part of the experience,

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so you cannot do away with it.

341
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But interestingly, this choice was not condemned

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00:15:40,941 --> 00:15:42,286
too vehemently by gamers.

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I was afraid that they would kill us,

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and instead they understood, especially

345
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when I told them that I was trying to apply the same strategem

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that Philip Johnson applied in 1934

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when he wanted to make people understand

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the importance of design, and he took propeller blades

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00:15:55,859 --> 00:15:58,139
and pieces of machinery and

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in the MoMA galleries he put them on white pedestals

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00:16:01,266 --> 00:16:04,483
against white walls, as if they were Brancusi sculptures.

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00:16:04,483 --> 00:16:08,211
He created this strange distance, this shock,

353
00:16:08,211 --> 00:16:11,869
that made people realize how gorgeous formally,

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00:16:11,869 --> 00:16:15,637
and also important functionally, design pieces were.

355
00:16:15,637 --> 00:16:17,891
I would like to do the same with video games.

356
00:16:17,891 --> 00:16:20,971
By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts

357
00:16:20,971 --> 00:16:23,579
and everything else that we might remember from our childhood,

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I want people to understand

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that those are important forms of design.

360
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And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else

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00:16:33,197 --> 00:16:35,881
lead us to make people understand

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00:16:35,881 --> 00:16:38,223
a wider meaning for design.

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One of my dream acquisitions,

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00:16:40,276 --> 00:16:42,191
which has been on hold for a few years

365
00:16:42,191 --> 00:16:45,193
but now will come back on the front burner,

366
00:16:45,193 --> 00:16:46,625
is a 747.

367
00:16:46,625 --> 00:16:49,563
I would like to acquire it, but without owning it.

368
00:16:49,563 --> 00:16:52,874
I don't want it to be at MoMA and possessed by MoMA.

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00:16:52,874 --> 00:16:54,258
I want it to keep flying.

370
00:16:54,258 --> 00:16:57,798
So it's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement

371
00:16:57,798 --> 00:17:02,565
with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying.

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00:17:02,565 --> 00:17:05,683
And the same with the "@" sign that we acquired a few years ago.

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It was the first example of an acquisition of something

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00:17:07,865 --> 00:17:09,270
that is in the public domain.

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00:17:09,270 --> 00:17:11,030
And what I say to people, it's almost as if

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00:17:11,030 --> 00:17:13,004
a butterfly were flying by

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00:17:13,004 --> 00:17:16,153
and we captured the shadow on the wall,

378
00:17:16,153 --> 00:17:17,610
and just we're showing the shadow.

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00:17:17,610 --> 00:17:19,818
So in a way, we're showing a manifestation

380
00:17:19,818 --> 00:17:22,331
of something that is truly important

381
00:17:22,331 --> 00:17:25,962
and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have.

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00:17:25,962 --> 00:17:27,898
And it's too long to explain the acquisition,

383
00:17:27,898 --> 00:17:30,404
but if you want to go on the MoMA blog,

384
00:17:30,404 --> 00:17:32,498
there's a long post where I explain why

385
00:17:32,498 --> 00:17:34,786
it's such a great example of design.

386
00:17:34,786 --> 00:17:38,147
Along the way, I've had to burn a few chairs. You know?

387
00:17:38,147 --> 00:17:42,466
I've had to do away with a few concepts of design past.

388
00:17:42,466 --> 00:17:45,282
But I see that people are coming along,

389
00:17:45,282 --> 00:17:47,032
that the audiences, paradoxically,

390
00:17:47,032 --> 00:17:49,858
are much more responsive and much more understanding

391
00:17:49,858 --> 00:17:53,916
of this expansion of design than some of my colleagues are.

392
00:17:53,916 --> 00:17:55,443
Design is truly everywhere,

393
00:17:55,443 --> 00:17:58,411
and design is as important as anything,

394
00:17:58,411 --> 00:18:00,871
and I'm so glad that, because of its diversity

395
00:18:00,871 --> 00:18:03,186
and because of its centrality to our lives,

396
00:18:03,186 --> 00:18:04,899
many more people are coming to it

397
00:18:04,914 --> 00:18:07,003
as a profession, as a passion,

398
00:18:07,003 --> 00:18:09,977
and as, very simply, part of their own culture.

399
00:18:09,977 --> 00:18:11,120
Thank you very much.

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(Applause)