Dr Emily M Orr

“Our Search for Symbols at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum”

The exhibition ‘Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols’ (on view at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through August 11, 2024) marks the 50th anniversary of designer Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols (1972), a manual that compiled and categorized thousands of symbols in use internationally. ‘Give Me a Sign’ draws from the working papers of the Symbol Sourcebook housed in Cooper Hewitt’s Henry Dreyfuss Archive; visitors can engage with this primary material across many different modes of interaction to explore the importance of symbols in our daily lives. Opportunities to learn from primary sources are present through imagery, video, text, touch, movement, and participation in the design process.

Henry Dreyfuss hoped that the Symbol Sourcebook would be a tool for the creation of new symbols. He envisioned that the resource would grow to represent the perspectives of more users and designers. In this collaborative spirit, visitors to ‘Give Me a Sign’ are invited to design their own symbols and co-create a Symbol Sourcebook of 2024 in Cooper Hewitt’s galleries. An interactive light table includes advice on the visual elements that make up symbols, provides tracing and drawing tools, and features a spinner with prompts for fresh ideas. Visitors are producing symbols for causes they care about, places they love, and offering ideas for warnings and messages of all kinds.  The origin story of the Symbol Sourcebook is inspiring visitors to take a critical look at symbols now and explore their evolution and future.

Biography
Dr Emily M Orr is Associate Curator and Acting Head of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her exhibitions include ‘Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols’ (2023-present), ‘Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer’ (2021-22), and ‘Botanical Expressions’ (2019-21). Orr is the author of ‘Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’ (2019).