Winter has a way of slowing things down. Animals hibernate. Ponds freeze over. And the human brain turns sluggish, resisting even repeated infusions of double mocha espresso. Then a funny thing happens. As the mind struggles to focus, elemental objects suddenly loom large. With the peculiar concentration of the dim-witted, the office worker still thawing out from his commute zeroes in on the things right in front of his nose: the cardboard sleeve around his hot coffee cup, his Bic pen, the Band-Aid on his finger, a curling yellow Post-it note.
It turns out that he is not just goofing off. He is practicing looking at things the way a designer does -- in particular, the way the curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art does in a new book that seems expressly suited to winter reading and reflection. The book is titled "Humble Masterpieces," and it dispels seasonal blues with mini-essays on, and dizzyingly close-up photographs of, 100 everyday objects, or as author Paola Antonelli calls them, "everyday marvels of design."
All of our sluggish hero's office supplies are celebrated here, along with bubble wrap and the pushpin. But so are such nonoffice design triumphs as the M&M, the flat-bottomed brown paper grocery bag and the red AIDS awareness ribbon (which, Ms. Antonelli points out, "addresses a profoundly difficult cause with a disarmingly simple design.") Not everything in the book is modern or American. The Australian Aboriginal boomerang, which goes back 15,000 years, gets a nod, as do China's 5,000-year-old bead-frame abacus and chopsticks. (Maladroit foreigners will not be surprised to learn here that using chopsticks involves more than 30 joints and 50 muscles.)
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