Read Time: 1.5 minutes
Seattle’s award-winning team at Studio Matthews recently premiered the design of their newest exhibition at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center: "Design with the 90%." The exhibition, curated by Cynthia E Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and presented by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center, is the third exhibition in the newly launched rotating exhibit space.
Design with the 90% highlights twenty-six projects from designers across the globe that aim to improve life in some of the world’s most marginalized communities through design innovation. These approaches focus on a wide range of issues in medicine, education, shelter, communications, reproductive health and sanitation. he team at Studio Matthews was tasked with designing a flexible system to accommodate 26 projects, including an eclectic mix of artifacts, materials, imagery and statistics. Projects range from a coffee-grinding bicycle to eyeglasses with liquid-filled lenses whose prescriptioncan be changed on the spot. The 26 projects come together in a uniquely diverse exhibition about the power of design as an approach to problem-solving.
Studio Matthews designed the exhibition to reflect the content it embodies; honest, accessible projects that aim to improve the lives they touch. To that end, the design, fabricated by Pacific Studio in Seattle, is entirely comprised of sustainable, recyclable materials that are still robust enough to last through the nine-month-long exhibition.
Design with the 90% opened in September with 14 of the project designers from various corners of the world in attendance, joining hundreds of guests who poured in from Seattle and beyond. The exhibition will remain open through May 2019.
More from Studio Matthews
Image credit: Rafael Soldi
