The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York has appointed Andrew Blauvelt as its new curator at large for design and John Underkoffler as curator at large for design technology, effective immediately. Blauvelt currently serves as director of the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and will remain in the role during his tenure at MAD.

Prior to joining Cranbrook, Blauvelt spent seventeen years at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, serving in various curatorial and administrative roles, including as design director and senior curator of design, research, and publishing. Among Blauvelt’s recent curatorial projects are “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986 (2018), which debuted at the Cranbrook Art Museum and will be on view at MAD from April 9 through August 18.

With more than fifteen years of experience in the technology sector, Underkoffler founded Oblong Industries, the developer of the technology platform g-speak, which creates applications that can run across multiple screens and multiple devices; worked at the MIT Media Lab; and served as a science adviser to major motion pictures, including Minority Report (2002) and Iron Man (2008). He also sits on the boards of directors of the Sequoyah School in Pasadena, California, and the E14 Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The future will show that right about now was the time that the old art-and-science (or design-and-technology) hybrid went from being an occasional novelty to being a crucial mode for addressing the planet’s most urgent problems and opportunities,” Underkoffler said. “I am thrilled to assist MAD in illuminating—and I expect also to some extent catalyzing—this evolution.”