On the Trail of Grassroots Innovation Across America

On the top floor of the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt museum in Manhattan, a large, beat-up plastic barrel, painted blue, rests against the wall of the third-floor exhibit hall. Housed in a regal Upper East Side building, Cooper Hewitt is a maze of ornate staircases and rich wooden walls; walking through it, one expects to encounter objects of beauty, easily classifiable as “art.”

The lurid blue drum is not one of those things. But to Cynthia E. Smith, Cooper Hewitt’s curator of socially responsible design, it still deserves a place in a museum. Smith compiled objects for Cooper Hewitt’s most recent show, By the People: Designing a Better America, which is on view through February. For the exhibit, Smith collected 60 examples of recent and ongoing place-based innovation projects. Some are large-scale and well-known, like Toronto’s Underpass Park, captured through photographs and renderings; others might not even register, to a casual viewer, as design.