At MoMA, designs for living

Fun has its limits, though, as does familiarity. An even greater value afforded by “Pirouette” has to do with unfamiliarity. The first thing a visitor sees on entering the exhibition is a 7-foot-tall ball. This remarkable device is a Mine Kafon wind-powered deminer. Designed by Massoud Hassani in 2011, it’s made of nothing more elaborate than bamboo and biodegradable plastics. Its purpose is to roll over land where mines are suspected to be so as to detonate them.

It’s hard to imagine an object of greater, or sadder, utility — unless it’s the Middle Upper Arm Circumference measuring device, or Bracelet of Life, developed by Doctors Without Borders in response to the Sudanese famine of 1998. Unlike the deminer, it’s easy to miss among the the more than 100 items in “Pirouette.” Slipped over a young child’s upper arm, its color-coding gives an immediate indication of the degree he or she might be malnourished. The Bracelet of Life is at once a testament to human ingenuity and indictment of human indifference.

Both the deminer and Bracelet of Life leave considerations of mere aesthetics far behind. They’re a reminder that good design can be a literal matter of life and death.

The earliest design in “Pirouette” dates from the 1870s, flat-bottomed paper bags. The most recent are from last year: Flaxwood Tiles, primarily made out of linseed oil, and the Monobloc Chair, made out of polypropylene. Materials can matter as much as appearance and purpose.

Even when a design can be credited to a single individual, as with Hassani’s, or small group the designer or designers aren’t likely to be famous. You’ve likely heard of Spanx. It’s far less likely you’ve heard of the woman who invented them, Sara Blakely. Décolletage Plastique Design Team, which was responsible for the Bic Cristal ballpoint pen — the world’s best-selling writing implement — has a very cool name. But who can identify any of its members? Good design doesn’t have to be anonymous, but it often is.

Some famous names do figure in “Pirouette.” Ray and Charles Eames appear twice, with a rocking armchair and with a design for the nose of a military glider. Virgil Abloh is here (transparent DJ equipment), as is Milton Glaser, with several sketches for his “I ❤ NY” logo. The most famous design name doesn’t belong to a designer, per se. It’s Steve Jobs. Along with Jerry Manock, who is credited for the design of Apple’s Macintosh 128K home computer.

What looked so futuristic then, looks so clunky now. Yes, there’s a lesson in that. Sometimes design begins with appearance — Swatches, say. Sometimes it begins with function — the Sony Walkman. Ultimately, any successful design involves both. Good design never sleeps, though bad design can induce yawns.

Apple is also here with Susan Kare’s sketches for Mac OS icons. Some of the most striking and/or highest-profile designs in “Pirouette” are incorporeal: Glaser’s logo; Kare’s sketches; examples of signage from the Boston-based Accessible Icon Project; genomic cartography; such digital typefaces as OCR-A, Oakland, and Retina; the @ sign for email; Google map pins; the power symbol for electronic devices — you know, the broken circle with a vertical line at the top.

In a category of its own are emojis. The term derives from the Japanese words e (meaning “picture”) and moji (“character”). Shigetaka Kurita, who designed them in the late ’90s, was influenced by manga, the Zapf Dingbats typeface, and emoticons. The first batch consisted of 176 emojis. Now there are more than 3,700. Design marches on.

Depending on how you look at it, Ed Hawkins’s Warming Stripes is dissembodied — it’s a data-visualization graphic — or it takes in the greatest body of all: the entire planet. Hawkins is an English climate scientist. He’s devised a color-coded rendering of the rise in Earth’s temperature over the past two centuries. Seen in strictly visual terms, the graphic is quite pleasing to look at. It could be a Morris Louis painting. Understood conceptually, it’s alarming to contemplate. It could be — no, it very much is — a warning.

PIROUETTE: Turning Points in Design

At Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53d St., New York, through Nov. 15. 212-708-9400, www.moma.org

Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].