In 1970, [poet John] Giorno worked with MoMA to create an installation called “Dial-a-Poem,” in which visitors were invited to call a number to hear one of 50 poems. “They had to figure out how to do it—they had to hook up tape recorders and solve a bunch of difficult problems,” Slavin said. “And they did, and that idea led to a multibillion-dollar industry of 1-800 numbers.”
Slavin’s point was that when designers and artists flirt with science and technology, they can unlock new ways of thinking, from which new ways of being and doing emerge.