All posts filed under: Things for Learning

Saving the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum

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Jim Moran got some bad news last October while he was preparing for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum’s annual conference in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Moran, who is director of the world’s only museum dedicated to the preservation, study, production, and printing of wood type, was told by his landlord that the museum had six months to find a new home. The news wasn’t entirely a shock. Moran and his small team had noticed that the building owner, lab equipment manufacturer Thermo Fisher Scientific, had begun downsizing the employees that shared the massive building, which was rapidly deteriorating. The museum, which was founded in 1999, took up 12,000-square-feet (with an additional 25,000 for storage) of the three-block long, 1.3 million-square-foot facility that the Hamilton Manufacturing Company had built, and added to, from 1910 to 1926. The manufacturer had donated free rent, lighting, and heat to the museum, but they were now closing their Two Rivers plant and moving production elsewhere. (MORE AFTER PHOTOS) Moran had to quickly raise the estimated $250,000 needed to pack …

Light Bulb Magnets

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Along with the Museum of the City of New York’s new textile exhibition “The World of D.D. and Leslie Tillett,” (on display through February 3rd) the museum shop is offering a set of 18 light bulb magnets designed by D.D. and Leslie’s daughter Linnaea Tillett, owner of Brooklyn-based Tillett Lighting. Linnaea, who once served as a juror in a product design competition I run for my day job, has a doctorate in environmental psychology, and is celebrated for her firm’s lighting of public and private interiors, including, most recently, the lighting for FDR Four Freedoms Park on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. Linnaea worked with Tillett in-house designer/illustrator Charlie Brokate, whose black and white drawings appear on the front of each magnet. LEDs, CFLs, and other sources of illumination are joined by the ever-present cell phone, which often doubles as a light in a dark theater. The set of 18 magnets are available for $22 from the shop of the Museum of the City of New York, http://www.mcny.org

Nendo Designs a Library & “Books” for Starbucks Pop-up Shop in Toyko

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For a clever pop-up shop concept in Tokyo, the Japanese design firm Nendo designed a library-like space where visitors could review “books” in nine different colors that correspond to a different espresso drink. Once a visitor finds a drink that they want, they would “check-in” the book for an actual espresso drink, but keep the “book” cover with info on their beverage. The reverse side of the book cover can be punched out and used as an insert for tall or short size tumblers. The shop only lasted for a few weeks in Tokyo in September…but perhaps we will see one popping up in another city soon?