Last week saw the opening of the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art (check out the show online here). Organized by Paola Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, the exhibition focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use. "If design is to help enable us to live to the fullest while taking advantage of all the possibilities provided by contemporary technology, designers need to make both people and objects perfectly elastic," writes Antonelli in the exhibition catalogue. "It will entail some imaginative thinking -- not simply following a straight line from A to C passing through B." Among the products of such non-linear thinking is well, a whole new world. Dubbed "New City," the installation is the work of Imaginary Forces creative director Peter Frankfurt, architectural designer Greg Lynn, and production designer Alex McDowell.

"What's on display at MoMA can be described as the world's grooviest napkin sketch," says Frankfurt, co-founder of Imaginary Forces, the production and design studio based in New York and Los Angeles. "It's a multimedia experience describing what New City could really be, which is the first architecturally-considered virtual environment." Visitors experience that napkin sketch as what looks like a three-sided geodesic dome that is surrounded by a mosaic of screens that play a seven-minute video (a still from which is pictured above).

What are the practical implications? Rather mind-bendingly, New City could ultimately give leading architects, planners, or designers a place to erect impossible structures and generally experiment with urban design that couldn't possibly exist. "It becomes a very interesting space to showcase thinking and work that may not be doable in the actual world," notes Frankfurt. Now that's our kind of practicality!

And there's more where that came from. According to Frankfurt, the MoMA installation is "really meant to be as much of an invitation as it is a provocation." You have until May 12th to take him up on that invitation, and bring your open mind to "Design and the Elastic Mind" before it closes.