Edwin Arthur Schlossberg (born July 19, 1945) is an American designer, artist, and author. A pioneer and leader of interactive museum installations, he is the founder and principal designer of ESI Design, a multidisciplinary firm specializing in interactive environments for discovery learning and communication. An author of eleven books including Interactive Excellence: Defining and Developing New Standards for the Twenty-first Century, Schlossberg’s artworks have also appeared in solo exhibitions and museum collections in the United States and around the world.
Edwin Arthur Schlossberg was born on July 19, 1945 in New York City to Alfred Schlossberg and Mae Hirsch and grew up in an extended Orthodox Jewish family.[1][2] Four of his great-grandparents were Ellis Island immigrants who were born within 50 miles of one another in the vicinity of Poltava, Ukraine.[3] His father was founder and president of a textile-manufacturing company and was also president of the Park East Synagogue in New York's Upper East Side where Schlossberg studied Hebrew and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.[4]
Schlossberg graduated from Manhattan's Birch Wathen School then took his undergraduate and post-graduate education at Columbia University eventually earning a Ph.D. in Science and Literature in 1971.[3][5][6] His thesis, which was later published as a book, was an imaginary conversation between Albert Einstein and Samuel Beckett, an idea that Schlossberg conceived while napping at Columbia’s philosophy library.[7] One of his advisors in Columbia was mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, and was also mentored by futurist Buckminster Fuller.[8][7]
Career
Schlossberg developed as an artist during the 1960s in New York.[9] His style has been described as usage of words and image, through unconventional media, to create visual poetry in his art.[9][10] He has been singled out as a "leader in interactive design" by Wired magazine,[8] and has also been called a Renaissance man, an intellectual jack-of-all-trades, and the grandmaster of interactivity by several publications.[8][7][11]
In an interview with Nature in 2009, Schlossberg stated: "If you put a bucket of water in front of a child—2 years old, 5 years old, even 8 years old—they will play with it forever. They learn a lot because they can craft a range of experiences as they integrate their sensory and physical worlds. I try to design like that”.[12]
Schlossberg, Edwin (1977). The philosopher's game: match your wits against the 100 greatest thinkers of all time. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN0312604629.
Fuller, R.B.; Schlossberg, E. (1977). Tetrascroll. Universal Limited Art Editions.
Schlossberg, Edwin (1985). The pirated edition of Stevens and Bohr: a record of correspondence between Wallace Stevens and Niels Bohr and journals written during that correspendence. London; Zurich: Princelet Editions. ISBN0862980143.
^Thomas E. Luebke, ed., Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 2013): Appendix B, p. 554.
