The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is not a research source for everyone. It is fun to visit, though, and it offers several design programs that you might be interested in, even if you’re not thinking of writing a paper on design. Does helping to create shoes for Nike or rides for Disney theme parks sound exciting? Read on. To come here for research, you really need a topic that has to do with art, design, or architecture... or Andrew Carnegie. (His former mansion is now the museum building.)

If your paper is in fact about art, design, architecture, or Andrew Carnegie, then this is the place to be. The museum is especially strong in anything relating to the history of design, decorative arts, and the role of design in everyday life. To get you started, you should consider taking a tour of the building or of the exhibits, but be warned: you need to call at least two weeks in advance. Also, you’ll need at least eight people.

We'd recommend walking into the first floor of the museum and sitting at the large table under the staircase that leads up to the second floor. On the table are several copies of a book about the exhibits on display. This book is comprehensive and gives background information that the text panels do not provide. After you’ve taken notes, walk through the exhibits and spend time on the items in the book that seem particularly interesting to you. The museum only has two small floors, and while these exhibits are fascinating to walk through, they will be valuable to you only after you’ve read up about them. Check the museum’s website for current exhibitions [http://www.ndm.si.edu/INFORMATION/index.html].

Since Cooper-Hewitt is by no means a history museum, in order to make use of it, you must approach the information creatively. While nothing on display in the museum will necessarily provide a topic for your research paper, everything can be used in some way. This is to say, you may not be doing a paper on the history of American kitchenware, but knowing some facts about it could be helpful in studying a topic like the American home front during World War II.

Creativity lends itself to papers that are fun and interesting both to read and to write. So go crazy here—have some fun with the exhibits and look to the research opportunities (see next paragraph) to help you incorporate the exhibits into your paper. Cooper-Hewitt is a unique museum whose exhibits may be sparse in terms of context, but it has great research resources.

What you should pay attention to at Cooper-Hewitt are the research opportunities and the school programs. You can research stuff in the museum’s collection that is not on display in addition to researching what is on display. You should start your research at the Design Education Resource Library. You’ll need to make an appointment to use the library. Call (212) 849-8385 to do that. Although you’ll need an appointment, the library is free and it’s open to everyone. In the library you will find many useful design education manuals and books. You should try and have an idea of what you want to look at when you call so that the educators in the library can have material ready for you. Depending on how your research in the Design Education Library goes you may be directed to view objects in the collection or to visit the Museum Library. While you will probably not be well received by the curatorial staff who take care of the collection, you should consider also visiting the Museum Library. It is very extensive and free and visits can be scheduled fairly easily by calling (212) 849-8330.

The depth of the Copper-Hewitt collection is really astounding. Pieces date from the time of ancient Greece to the present day. To give you an idea of the enormity and the greatness of the museum’s collections, you can look at its four curatorial departments: Applied Arts and Industrial Design, Drawings and Prints, Textiles, and Wall Coverings. The Applied Arts and Industrial Design division consists of over 40,000 three-dimensional objects. These objects include chairs, lighting fixtures, tablewares, gates, match safes, buttons, and birdcages.

The museum holds more than 160,000 works of art dating from the Renaissance to the present day in its Drawings and Print Division. These designs are for the decorative arts, ornaments, gardens, jewelry, theater, interiors, graphic and industrial design, and even the fine arts. A 30,000-piece textile division includes embroidery, knitting, braiding, quilting, knotting, crochet, needlework, bobbin lace, dyed fabrics, and woven fabrics. A 10,000-piece wall covering division is the best collection of its kind in the country. This section of the collection contains wall coverings from the wealthiest homes to the simplest ones. Be it gilded leather, block print, patterned, or scenic print, there are examples of it.

This collection may be daunting due to its size, but it offers a wealth of information, so don’t be afraid. One thing you should note is that many objects do come from foreign countries, and date back to the time before the U.S. existed. If you are tracing the emergence of an American tradition and need to look beyond American design to see its origins and its influences, the non-U.S. part of the collection could be really useful to you.

A word of advice: though each curatorial division has its own phone number for appointments, which you can get online, don’t call them first. Like we mentioned above, start at the Design Education Resource Library and let them direct you to the curatorial divisions. You will get a much better reception from the curators this way.

We mentioned educational programs -- of all the programs at the different museums that we have visited, the Cooper-Hewitt’s programs are among the best. For example, Design Directions, aimed at high school kids interested in design, was based on the idea that students should be able to come in on their own. So programs are scheduled around the school day, and you can participate for free (if you are a New York City public school student). Design Directions offers Design Days, one-day-long hands-on workshops with professional designers; Design Studios, multi-session after-school design workshops with professional designers; Portfolio Workshops, where a panel of college professors and admissions officers discusses how to create design portfolios for college and your later career; college and university visits and application workshops, which are one-day sessions that explore opportunities for studying design at the college level; studio visits—you go visit actual designers’ workplaces—and internships, which are 10-week-long work opportunities in different design studios.

In the past, Design Direction workshops have paired students with designers to create a clothing line for the Gap, rides for Disney theme parks, on-air promos for MTV, websites about contemporary global issues for the internet company Concrete Media, shoes for Nike, and plans for the future of the Washington Heights neighborhood. In the spring of 2003, students in Design Directions helped plan the rebuilding of downtown New York.

All of these programs are first-come, first-serve, so call to reserve yourself a place in the ones that interest you as soon as you can. We would definitely recommend taking advantage of these programs, especially if the ones you are interested in are relevant to your research topic. To find out about the newest Design Direction programs and to register for the ones that you want to participate in, call (212) 849-8390.

In addition to programs aimed at students there are also several adult programs. These programs, however, are not free and can be rather expensive. Some are restricted only to educators. If there is an adult program that is of particular interest to you, check if you are eligible to participate and ask if the museum will cover the cost for you. There is no guarantee that they will be able to do this, but if they can, they will.