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Edwin Schlossberg Day in Brooklyn
Eve Baron, senior planner and policy analyst with the Brooklyn Borough President's Office, presents interactive design pioneer Edwin Schlossberg, right, with "Edwin Schlossberg Day in Brooklyn" proclamation as City Technology President Fred W. Beaufait looks on.
Advertising Design & Graphic Arts Department Chair Joel Mason chats with Edwin Schlossberg, left, at a reception attended by 100 students, faculty and community leaders following the May 1 presentation.
May 1 was "Edwin Schlossberg Day in Brooklyn" as the renowned interactive design pioneer returned to the borough where his career began more than 30 years ago with the design of major interactive learning exhibits for the Brooklyn Children's Museum.
During a 90-minute, multi-media presentation to several hundred students, faculty and community leaders in City Tech's Klitgord Center Auditorium, Schlossberg spoke of the philosophy that underlies the many computer-aided and other installations that he and his award-winning firm, ESI Design, have created in diverse cultural settings and other public places nationwide. These include the Ellis Island American Family Immigration History Center, the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC, the Sony Wonder Technology Lab in Manhattan and the Los Angeles Children's Museum.
At the heart of that philosophy is the Hindi word "raunag," or "the delight of being in crowds." Schlossberg believes that a visit to a museum "must involve more than the mere solitary viewing of objects. Museums should be places where visitors learn through interactions with the environment and also from one another."
An essential aim of all Schlossberg installations is to foster communication among people by using technology to connect them with one another and foster a widespread sharing of what they are thinking, feeling and otherwise experiencing. "The success of any museum or other cultural institution," he says, "should be measured by the extent to which it both informs and engages people."
This engagement is central to the interactive learning experiences Schlossberg and his firm create. At the Ellis Island American Family Immigration History Center, visitors can both research a vast database of ships' manifests from 1892 to 1924 for evidence of their ancestors' arrival in America and add new material that becomes a permanent part of the center's database. Forty percent of all Americans can trace their roots to at least one ancestor whose records are included in this database.
The interactive system Schlossberg designed enables visitors to retrieve a copy of the paperwork recording their ancestors' processing through Ellis Island as well a photo of the ship on which they arrived. They can also add photographs, films and documents to the database and record oral histories. The historical records at Ellis Island are not mere history frozen in time, but history still in the making.
Not only can individuals access the center's vast database on the more than 22 million immigrants who entered America through the Port of New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by physically visiting the Ellis Island center, but they can also access it online. The Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island website at www.ellisisland.org has generated 4 billion "hits" during its first two years of operation, and has been hailed as one of the biggest site launches in the history of the Internet.
Edwin Schlossberg is the author of 11 books, including his groundbreaking Interactive Excellence: Defining and Developing New Standards for the Twenty-first Century and a best seller on calculator games. He and his wife Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg have three children and live in New York.
Photo Credit: Ken Brown
