Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
2 East 91st Street
New York, NY
This full-floor exhibition includes objects from Cooper Hewitt and nine other Smithsonian collections, spanning 1.85 million years of tool use and design, to explore how tools extend the human body—augmenting our ordinary grasp and power, extending the limits of our senses, sometimes even serving as substitutes (in the case of prostheses)—while considering how some tools break into our lives as radical innovations, whereas many others have remained almost unchanged in form and function for centuries.
Some of the objects on view include:
- An artificial heart, a Braille typewriter, and a WWII escape map
- Eskimo snow goggles carved from fossil ivory
- A hand chopper made from volcanic rock
- A live feed of the Sun transmitted by an orbiting satellite
- A 3D printer that can operate in zero gravity
Related book: Tools: Extending Our Reach
