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Curated or Crowd-Sourced? MoMA Taps into the Vox Pop via Kickstarter

Curated or Crowd-Sourced? MoMA Taps into the Vox Pop via Kickstarter

Move over, Aalto vases and Eames coat racks: there are some fresh new works  available at the Museum of Modern Art Design Store. Sourced in partnership with Kickstarter, 24 products from 20 international designers are getting a shot at icon status over the course of four short weeks.

As with the standard stock of the MoMA store, timepieces, toys, and techy items are well represented among these limited editions. An elegant, spare wooden wristwatch by Lorenzo Buffa (716 backers on Kickstarter) is offered in light and dark finishes, with an innovative bonded-wood and leather strap. Created by art professors Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin, the NeoLucida Drawing Aid (11,406 backers) is a portable, prism-based tool that projects the subject matter of a sketch onto a sheet of blank paper, so it can be easily traced. The Powerslayer Phone Charger Kit (597 backers), designed by Justin Champaign and Velvetwire, detects when your smartphone is fully charged, and then frugally breaks the power connection, saving both money and battery life.

Emmanuel Platt, the director of merchandising of MoMA’s retail division, came to the museum from another bastion of fine design: The Conran Shop, where he was president of U.S. operations. “We were inspired to pursue this project because so many of the most impressive, new, and innovative products we have been finding lately kept leading up back to Kickstarter,” he said in a statement. “It became clear that Kickstarter is an important new way for good design to come into being, and we wanted to celebrate that.”

The Kickstarter collection will be available from through June 16. And there’s a launch party tonight during New York Design week [aka #NYCxDesign] on May 19 at the MoMA Design Store SoHo from 6:00 to 9:00. Meet the makers, eat & drink, and drink & eat. Be polite and RSVP to rsvp_momastore@moma.org.


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