Yesterday, we took a field trip to the Cooper Hewitt, which is a design museum on 91st street operated by the Smithsonian. I’d never been, though many people I trust have told me that I’d love it, and I was so jazzed when there was a lot of interest at Set the Week on Monday. We wound up with a crew of 7: me, Mason, Hugo, Olive, Aniya, Sebastian, and Even. Seven is a great size for a field trip - small enough to easily track but big enough to have different people to share discoveries with.

The weather was beautiful, so we walked down from school to the Cooper Hewitt, along Central Park, chatting about Steven Universe and Marvel and school adventures and other fandoms. The Cooper Hewitt is in an old mansion right on the park, built by Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the 20th century. The exterior is lots of brick and wrought-iron, and the interior features a lot of beautifully paneled wood walls and a really gorgeous dark wood, curving staircase in the lobby leading to the second floor.

One of the coolest things about the Cooper Hewitt: it’s free for young people (though grownups have to pay $18). The other cool thing: they give every guest a stylus pen thingy that you can press to an object description to save for later! Once you save it, there’s a code on your ticket that lets you view all your saved items online at home.

When I offered the trip Monday, I specifically pitched the Artificial Intelligence exhibit, which just opened, and so we went there first. It was pretty cool and also eye-opening - they centered tech that recognized facial expressions and tries to id people by their race/age/sex and also highlighted how this technology is being widely used already, often without the knowledge or consent of the public (scary). The exhibit was small, though, and Sebastian had already collected all the display info in that room and wanted to move on so we did.

Turns out, the rest of the Cooper Hewitt was devoted to design inspired by nature - there were rooms of paisley and embroidery, rooms of spiral staircases and self-organizing nanobots, technology to replace a shoulder joint inspired by the shape of a coral, a tree with 40 different fruit branches grafted together, dresses made of phosphorescent silk, a room where you can create an interactive wallpaper, wobbly top chairs, and lots and lots of cool interactive tech tables. We rambled around and talked about patterns and hyperbolic shapes and bone and plastic and the shape of the universe and monarch habitats and a closed ecosystem and being buried in a mushroom suit so you can decompose properly. We spent all day there and saw almost everything - it’s a good-sized museum in that there’s a lot to see but it’s not too overwhelming to do in one day. By 2:00 we were done, and hopped on the bus back to school. It was a great trip - highly recommend this museum!