Paola Antonelli: Design in Our Time at MoMA

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast. Our guest today, Paola Antonelli, is the senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, as well as the museum’s founding Director of research and development. She’s indisputably one of the world’s foremost experts in design, having curated over a dozen exhibitions at MoMA and written countless books and essays on the subject. Among her many accolades, Paola has been named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries in the world by Time Magazine, earned the Design Mind Smithsonian Institution’s National Design Award, and been inducted into the US Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. As a curator, Paola’s work encompasses designs many forms from lamps to typefaces to video games. Her exhibitions, lectures and writings, investigate designs many interactions with other disciplines from technology to ecology, and with the lives of all people, species and planets. While storytellers build fictional worlds, designers build the real world. So we have a lot to learn from a globally renowned curator of design like Paola. She’s also a long-term supporter, advisor, and friend to the Future of Storytelling. So it is a special pleasure for me to welcome Paola Antonelli to the FoST podcast.

Paola, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast.

Paola Antonelli:

Thank you, Charlie. Very happy to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s such a pleasure to get to spend some time speaking with you. I’ve been such a fan of the work that you do at the Museum of Modern Art for so long, and I’ve always thought of you as one of the great leaders in the field. The work you do there really I think sets a standard and challenges people to think about what design means. It leads me to that first question of how do you think about design? How do you define design?

Paola Antonelli:

Definition is almost impossible because it’s as if you were asking me to define art or literature. I mean, you can talk about words making literature and art being made by some kind of desire to express oneself, and design is something that pursues a goal, but these are very vague and abstract definition. So I can only tell you, I studied architecture and I studied it in Milan at a time when there were so many students that we had to be abstract. There was no way to do anything practical. So the theory was really quite sharp, and I learned that design is a methodology and a way of create that is really towards a goal. And you measure the quality of design. And when I say design, I also mean architecture. I consider architecture a branch of design. So you measure the quality of design by how elegantly, how efficiently, how sustainably, how rationally or not the designer has achieved those goals. So there’s always almost like a declaration with the cards on the table, and then you show how you get there. So there’s this quality. The process is so important in design.

Charlie Melcher:

I think a lot of people come to design thinking that it’s about objects or commercialism designing a product or making a chair or something. It’s very tangible, very physical. Is that part of it for you?

Paola Antonelli:

Not at all. First of all, sometimes people compare design and art and say, oh, design is commercial. I think that art is so much more commercial than design. Design is very straightforward in its value scheme. There’s a price, you pay it and then you own the design. And I’m particularly keen on the kind of design that many people, as many people as possible can own. But that said, in some cases, designing is tangible. In others it’s not. Also digital design is design. So the physicality of it is only in part. I do believe that form is important to design. So I like to dwell on form. There are some curators that instead don’t care about form at all. I still believe that it’s important, it’s part of the design process, but it can be digital or five dimensional.

Charlie Melcher:

Do you believe that objects can tell stories?

Paola Antonelli:

Of course, I believe they can tell stories and I believe they can talk. And I actually did a whole exhibition about it. I mean, in 2011 there was this exhibition called Talk to Me. So it was about the communication between people and objects. I believe that they have told stories for centuries, for millennia, but now after the digital evolution, it’s become even more explicit, right? We’ve come to expect objects to talk to us, and if they don’t, something’s not really working. And what I want to share with the audience of MoMA and with everybody that will care to listen is that curiosity. Try to be curious about the story behind the object, because there’s a lot that is going to be disclosed to you.

Charlie Melcher:

Paola, you’re also known for pushing the edges of what is considered designed to be exhibited at museums, and one of the best examples is bringing video games into MoMA. Tell me, why did you do that? What’s interesting about that for you?

Paola Antonelli:

See, to me, it was almost like a no brainer. If design is the ability to use the means at your disposal, whether they are wood, concrete, or digital code towards a goal, whether the goal is to make somebody sit or to build a church or to make somebody have fun, then the material doesn’t really matter. It is what it is, and the evaluation can be transported to all these different dimensions and universes. So add to that, that MoMA is about, it had this motto that was actually outside of the door in the 1930s, fifties. It was about the art of our time. Then you look at our time, video games are incredibly important, and whether you look at them as art or as design, interactive design as I did, or as illustration or as cinematography, they are a super important part of the way we live. And they became even more important during the pandemic because so many young people lived in the universe of video game to also socialize. So they are an incredibly fundamental dimension of our life, and they have to be considered.

Charlie Melcher:

So many things that are designed start in a kind of vernacular or popular usage. They’re not high art. They’re things that are being designed for practical purposes, a bus sign, a spoon, or whatever it is. Over time, some of them become considered great works. I even think of that in the history of storytelling. Shakespeare was not fine art when he was making his plays, people went there for entertainment. And I sometimes think that maybe we’re doing the same thing with video games, that the great video game creators today will someday be considered like Shakespeare. But I wonder, did you receive some resistance from the art world for bringing video games into Museum of Modern Art

Paola Antonelli:

By bringing up Shakespeare? You really touched upon a very important topic. What is the difference and who cares about the difference between fine art and design? It’s very funny, right? Because to me, there are two different things, and the appreciation of design as art or not as art is something that in a way is moot great. Design is great when many people take advantage of it, feel it, use it, and participate in it. That said, video games were introduced in the collection of MoMA as design. And yes, the art world, some of the art world went bananas. There was in particular this critic, Jonathan Jones from The Guardian that was completely incensed to say, oh, no, no, you cannot have Picasso next to Pacman. And I was thinking, first of all, there’s five floors in between. And secondly, Picasso was considered that way at his time.

And so that was the reaction. It was a reaction that was very, not only him, but a few others that was very defensive as if really the fortress was being by the Hiddens, right? So fine. It really didn’t hurt me. I have very thin skin. I usually get hurt by bad criticism. That was not bad criticism, that was just like a cry from another universe. But once again, games have been around for centuries right now. You can do them online, but it’s the same. That’s what I’m always trying to make people understand. You can transport design in different dimensions, and it’s still design

Charlie Melcher:

As our listeners consider themselves storytellers in one form or another. And I would love to hear your thoughts about the difference between design and storytelling. Somebody sits down to write a story or make a film to some degree, they are designing that narrative, they’re crafting those words, they’re crafting that film. Are they designers?

Paola Antonelli:

You’re definitely right. Everything can be designed. I mean, anytime you have goals and you have means to get there, you can take them as design. So from that viewpoint, scent is designed and in fact, I worked on it. And music can also be designed and definitely also literature can be considered that way, but we need to form our own set of expertise. So I stay usually within the five senses. That needs to be something that confronts at least one of our senses, and there needs to be this idea of goals and means. So it cannot be pure self-expression. There needs to be this idea of working for others. So storytelling definitely is a discipline that is of extreme interest to me, not only regarding design itself, but also regarding my profession as a curator. Every exhibition is a story that you tell, and you might tell it in a very linear, sequential, traditional way, or you might try to instead have everything everywhere all at once. But definitely there’s always a reflection on how the audience will receive the message that we as curators want to give them.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I just heard you say that being a curator is being a storyteller.

Paola Antonelli:

Definitely At the Museum of Modern Art in the archives, there’s a series of oral histories that many curators of yesteryear have left. There’s one by Emilio Ambass, who is a curator and architect, a designer. And in that oral history, he talked about the different types of curators that in his mind exist. And there are several, I mean, the word curation curator is about taking care. So the classical curator takes care of objects for posterity. But then he said, speaking about himself, he said, there’s the curator that is like a hunter gatherer, right? That just goes and takes this bleeding fray that is still warm and brings it back to its like children. And I don’t consider myself a hunter gatherer, but definitely I consider myself a reporter. I deal with contemporary design, I revere journalism, and I see myself really as bringing back what I find and expressing it for the audience in a way that is never objective, that is very overtly my own viewpoint, so that people can agree, disagree, and my goal is to let them develop their own critical stance.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m trying to sort of also understand the difference in your mind between design and the things that are on the other floors at MoMA, the quote unquote art.

Paola Antonelli:

Let me ask you what is not more beautiful, but just more impactful, more meaningful to the world, a paperclip or a bronchis sculpture? I’m not arguing that the paperclip is better than the bronchi. I’m arguing that the bronchi is not necessarily better just because it’s somebody called it fine art. That’s what I’m trying to say. This value system is not really useful to anybody. And I praise the Museum of Modern Art for having had architecture and design and also film and photography since the very beginning. And that was 1929. And at that time, film and photography were not necessarily considered fodder for a museum of art. So it’s about making this statement about what are the different creative forms that we have to live in the world? And art and design could not live without each other, and the world could not survive without both of them.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s go back to video games. How do you choose a video game to put into the permanent collection? What are the criteria for that

Paola Antonelli:

A long time to establish those criteria? We started talking about acquiring video games in 2006, believe it or not. We had a one day symposium. We brought together all these different experts, graphic designers, interaction designers, cinematographers to discuss the future of the design collection, especially the communications graphic design collection. And that’s when we started talking about acquiring typefaces, video games, movie titles and symbols. So a lot of categories that then became part of the collection. The criteria, funny enough, are almost like a mixture of the criteria you would use for architecture and the ones that you would use for film in that there are notions of materials, there are notions of space, of time, what it adds to the world, what the experience is. So really it is architecture and film together in a way which tells you a lot about what video games are.

Charlie Melcher:

And how large is that collection now and are you adding to it every year?

Paola Antonelli:

Oh, it’s small. It’s only 36 games so far. And yeah, we keep adding, but that’s how we move. We proceed slowly. We acquire, I mean, if you think about the fact that MoMA has six curatorial departments we all acquire, and my department, which is the Department of Architecture and Design has both architecture, which means models, drawings, and fragments, and then design, which is three dimensional design, graphic design, digital design. So you see there’s a lot of artifacts that can go in the collection at any time. But I would say that already the collection speaks about our values when it comes to design, because all of these different titles that we included in the collection, some are very popular like Pacman or Tetris, others are indie games, so never alone that gave the title to the exhibition of video games that we did last year. So it’s a mixture, but what they all do is they add a new experience or a new way to use the technology to what is already there, so they move the profession and also the world farther.

Charlie Melcher:

And what about the field of interaction design? Isn’t that part of what makes games different from static objects or buildings even? There’s a component of play of agency

Paola Antonelli:

Definitely. And that’s how we acquired the games officially. They were acquired as examples of interaction design, and that’s also what makes video games a special type of design. All interaction design is about behavior, the idea that you can design behavior, and that’s also storytelling, but it’s more about world building and story modeling. So you bring in the participant, and when we did an exhibition in 2022, the exhibition was about interaction design, not only about video games, and it was divided in three sections, which tells you also a lot. One section was about the designer. So games that were really about the design, the designer would lead you where they wanted. Then there was a section that was about the gamer games that really needed the interaction, needed the player to fulfill them, and then one instead was more about the design or the space itself. But it really is important to understand that there is the designer that really controls the experience that you will have, but in some cases, the designer wants to give up some of the power and let instead the player have their own agency. Minecraft is a great example, and by the way, that’s also in the collection.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s fun to hear you talk about the importance of world building in these games. Certainly it’s a huge part of game design and also storytelling. But I say it’s fun because here you are as a curator of designed objects and architecture at MoMA, the things that make up the actual world. So it seems in a way to make perfect sense that you would then also be a curator for world building in virtual worlds.

Paola Antonelli:

Absolutely. I mean, any kind of world is my field. That’s where I do my field work.

Charlie Melcher:

I love this idea of playing hours and hours of Minecraft or other video games.

Paola Antonelli:

Please, you have no idea

Charlie Melcher:

If interaction design is a important topic for a curator at MoMA. What about experience design? We spend a lot of time at FO in the world of immersive theater, immersive entertainment, and a huge part of that is designing the experience for the guest. Is that an area you’ve thought of for MoMA?

Paola Antonelli:

It becomes very narrative. So it’s almost when we were discussing about literature before, it becomes a different set of expertise I can think of. I can think of a spatial experience, so I have not really considered it directly yet, even though there are some objects that are very experiential in the collection, I’m thinking of a lot of visualization design besides the video games. We started acquiring data visualizations back in 2008. Some of them might not be immersive in that they’re not immersive around the walls around you, but they’re very immersive in the way they present themselves on the screen. So we have not gone into the experiential design the way you describe it yet, maybe in the future, but just the same way, we haven’t gone really into interior design, but I would love to see a museum of Experience design and a museum that treats it not simply as a phenomenon or as a spectacle, but rather really explains the reasoning behind it. It would really be fabulous because we see a lot of immersive design right now, but sometimes I’m afraid that we might reach a peak and you’re the expert, so you would be able to tell me more.

Charlie Melcher:

Oh, I don’t think we’re even begun to find the language of this art form, of this craft. We’re just at the early days. Yeah,

Paola Antonelli:

Of course. But what we’re getting right now sometimes is a little too much, right? And instead, there are the few that are doing the really great work. I remember one of my favorite immersive design examples, do you remember The Wilderness Downtown? Sure,

Charlie Melcher:

Of course. With Chris Milk and Aaron Copeland. Yeah,

Paola Antonelli:

It was fantastic. And that was like 2011, and it was so simple and so powerful. It was about inputting the address where you grew up and then feeding the program whatever questions, answers the program would give you. And then at the end you would be crying, weeping because you would be talking to yourself as a child on your street where you grew up, and it was just the beginning of Google Earth. I mean, it was just the idea. That’s what I’m talking about. Sometimes it’s the idea that really defines the experience even more than the technology.

Charlie Melcher:

Are there any other examples? I was thinking you might be referring to someone like the Artist Collective in Japan, team Lab, for example. Well,

Paola Antonelli:

Team Lab at the beginning was just a revelation, but I think they remain trapped in their own style. That’s what happens. And it happens. It becomes almost like an art market conundrum. I remember the first time I ever saw Team Lab, it was an exhibition of their work in Yokohama at the aquarium. It was many, many years ago, and I could not leave, but then I saw another and another and another, and now when I go to a museum and there’s a team lab installation, I’m like, okay, it’s become a go-to thing that I hope they’ll be able to change and maybe go from that dreamy flowers, insects to something more horrific or I don’t know. I don’t even know. I would love to see them take their amazing talent also in other directions. I don’t know how you feel about it.

Charlie Melcher:

I haven’t seen maybe as many of the pieces as you have. And I know that a lot of people have been wanting that piece of Team Lab, so there’s probably a lot of them out there. No, because

Paola Antonelli:

It’s fabulous. I mean, you cannot resist it. I mean, if you bring your children to a museum, that’s what you want them to experience, right? It’s very, very similar to the conundrum that artists sometimes find themselves in when they find something that really is appreciated by the public, and then the gallery does not allow them to move beyond that for

Charlie Melcher:

A moment. Going back to Team Lab. So their borderless exhibit in Tokyo, this is their own museum, and there you’re going in, you are in spaces where the art is projected on the walls, but it’s also responsive to the guests. It knows you’re there. It changes all the time. It’s not in any way static. It’s kind of redefined even the concept of a museum because there’s nothing in a frame. It’s all almost like organic and moving with the groups of people who come through and how they interact with it. I’m just wondering if you think that that is some piece of possible future for museums?

Paola Antonelli:

No, I don’t.

Charlie Melcher:

Perfect.

Paola Antonelli:

I think that the defining a museum is wrong, and right now I live on Broadway, right on Lower Broadway. So everything is a museum here, the Museum of Cannabis, the Museum of Insects, museum of Ice Cream. So I mean, I don’t know why they need to call themselves museums, but whatever. The Team lab is a fabulous installation. I wish they called it World, I wish they called it something. But museums are something different. Museums are places where there’s staff that is dedicated to sharing with you some and rotating messages that have some kind of desire to move culture forward. And I’m not saying that Team Lab doesn’t or well, the Museum of Ice Cream, I don’t really know, but it’s more about that museums are much more complex machines that make mistakes, that test new things, that try to gather people around ideas and that usually have collections.

I mean, one of the old definition of the museum is placed with a collection. I mean, sometimes you don’t make that differentiation anymore, but in our world, museums tend to have collections. So at MoMA, we’re always very careful about technology, and as mentioned, we started acquiring video games and we started acquiring visualization design. But even in the sixties, we were already acquiring video work and other work that was considered really ahead of its time. And lately we had a one year installation of RFI Canal, unsupervised work that is generative AI was a year of generative AI munching and chewing the MoMA collection. So we are not shying away from anything that deals with technology, with immersion or with storytelling, but we’re very careful about what goes into it. We’re very careful about what the art is and what the message is and what it adds to the world. So that’s really what I think is important. There’s so much intellectual work in a museum going on, and I’m not saying the team lab is not intellectual, but they made that installation. And the curation is it. It’s a one artist or one artist team museum with a series of pieces that sometimes get rotated when they get a little old. But that’s it.

Charlie Melcher:

And I know that you are also constantly thinking about the role of the museum and how you can redefine that or expand it. Just tell me a little bit about the work you do with the research and development at MoMA.

Paola Antonelli:

It’s a part of my job at MoMA that makes me so proud. So thank you for asking about, in 2008, there was the big financial crisis, and I have always had a chip of my shoulder against the financial sector because it’s considered so important to the destinies of a society, and instead art culture, EK cares. So when finally the financial sector showed its true colors, I said, okay, now we can demonstrate to the world that culture is where progress is. They can rely on us. Let’s start a department that shows the museums can be the r and d of society. And so I formed this little department very lean and mean, and our biggest output is a series of salons that we called MoMA R and d salons. We’re now at number 46.

Charlie Melcher:

Congratulations.

Paola Antonelli:

Thank you. These salons show that museums can really help people live their life. So we bring together about four or five speakers every time, plus videos from all over the world, at least one of them is a curator, another is an artist. And we talk about topics that matter to people. Death, aging after the pandemic and after the George Floyd murder, we did one on breath because it brought together covid and also the issue of George Floyd. We did one on angels, and the next one is about scale. Then we’re going to have a one about grace under pressure. So it really is about showing how artists and a place like a museum can help you live life.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the big changes over the last number of years at MoMA has to do with a change that we really believe strongly through the future of storytelling, which is this idea that the silos of media that used to be very distinct. I’m a filmmaker. Oh, I’m a journalist. Oh, I do music, and never shall the twain meet that those walls, that separate those silos are all coming down in this digital age that we live in where everything is sort of zeros and ones. And we certainly champion and foster all of these multihyphenate creators and cross-disciplinary engagements and storytelling. And I’ve certainly seen that manifest very strongly on the walls at MoMA when what used to be these fiefdoms of departments, photography here, painting there, design architecture here now all seem to be collaborating and doing shows that are really mixed amongst them. Can you tell us a little bit about how that evolution happened?

Paola Antonelli:

Thank you for noticing, because it took a huge, huge effort on the part of the curators, the trustees, I mean the whole museum registrar, et cetera. But it’s something that started a long time ago. About 10, 15 years ago, we started noticing the need to expand our collection, to expand the diversity, the range, geographic range. And so we set up a series of study groups and also funds that were about collecting what we had not collected enough before. We started having study groups about different parts of the world, Southeast Asia, or right now there’s West Africa, Eastern Europe, so Latin America. So really working for years on studying what we didn’t know before, understanding that there cannot be one canon anymore, that there’s many moderns, not only the one that we told since 1929, and also in the process, we started seeing the need to tell these stories across departments.

It culminated in the reopening of MoMA 2019 after ending the building by Delis Cofi Ro. That is the expansion on the west side of the block. The collection now is much more complex, much more interesting as a story that we’re telling. We’re still committed to our public, so we know that there are a few milestones of Modernisms that we need to have. It’s about 10 pictures that need to be somewhere in the museum. But I have to say that right now, probably the major part of the energy of the museum goes into showing the collection in this new way.

Charlie Melcher:

Paolo, when I think about storytelling, I think about it as this ancient craft that helped to motivate and move large numbers of people. And I’m certainly a believer that with some of the big challenges that we face in the world today, part of the problem, if not the core problem, is the lack of a common narrative or a positive narrative that we can get behind. So I’m one of these people who believes that storytellers have the power to make positive change in the world. Do you feel the same for design?

Paola Antonelli:

Absolutely. And also the common narrative is one thing, or the curiosity about other narratives is another, right? So I’m really trying with my job to stimulate curiosity, respect, and a love for the world, for other people, for other species, for things altogether. And stories are one of the biggest weapons at our disposal to make this revolution happen.

Charlie Melcher:

I also really enjoyed the lifecycles exhibit that you have up now, and the first sentence of the wall text is, good design can be an agent of positive sustainable change,

Paola Antonelli:

And it completely is true. Design is about change. Whenever there’s revolutions that happen in science, technology, designers are the ones that make them into life. From the internet to the microwave ovens, I mean everything. It’s about percolating things down to people. So by doing so, and also having the power to influence behaviors, design is a powerful agent of change.

Charlie Melcher:

I think that’s a beautiful place to end our conversation. Thank you so much for the time. As you have been for years and years and years, we’re excited to have you be part of the Future of Storytelling community.

Paola Antonelli:

My pleasure.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been The Future of Storytelling Podcast. Thanks for listening. FoST is a community that brings together all types of creatives, from designers to marketers, to entrepreneurs, to artists and technologists, and many more. If storytelling is an essential part of your personal or professional life, you are in the right place. You can subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought, or learn more about our annual membership community, the FoST Explorers Club by going to our website at fost.org. If you love this show, please consider subscribing and leaving a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.