I saw it over thanksgiving.. I'd give it about a 3.5-4.0 out of five.

I'd agree there was a lot to read, but there was a diverse enough selection of things that you could skip stuff you weren't interested in and focus on the things that did interest you. My biggest con was some of the "featured" objects like the segway, or even the exhibit of FOG's models seemed like they were product placements. I felt like he was trying to push you to buy a segway, or that FOG was the only architect using a computer.

Even though it stated that the exhibit was about showing the power of design, and how it can affect the rest of the world/life and not about asthetics, as a designer, I would have liked a little more emphasis on things that do good and look good.

I agree it would have been better if there were more interactive parts, but the interactive parts that existed were really well done. (flashlight room, voting boxes)

Overall I felt like I was walking through a 3d version of one of his books. If you turned the pages of Lifestyle or S,M,L,XL into walls and made some stuff 3d, that was the exhibit. (In it's execution, not necessarily content)

ok, you asked...it should be renamed ZERO CHANGE: now that we can fuck anyone, who will we fuck?

i went to this exhibit on a crowded saturday, so i have to go back soon to finish the reading. first impression: GLOSS, GLITTER and HYPE.
i think the title is extremely arrogant, considering the exhibit failed to address any of the crucial underlying issues that the world faces today and tomorrow, namely: worldwide resource inequality, spiralling debt in developed nations, escalating militarization, etc.
what the fuck was up with the 'military inventiveness' section?? am i supposed to believe that having vacuum-wrapped beef jerky originally developed for military use balances the billions poured into more lethal research? fuck off.
the tone of the exhibit is resoundingly neo-colonial: "oh, look how bad africa is fucked up, now we can go save it with all these neato gadgets that will never get built because, really, who would ever pay for 200 million of them!" maybe it does illustrate massive change for the world, if you consider the world to be defined as developed, wealthy, and primarily western.
another more general beef with 'high design' and technology in particular: it changes nothing. it is a red herring, a way for profoundly priveleged people and nations (us) to tinker around with cool toys under the guise of general philanthropy. remember how the internet was going to change everything? revolutionize this or that? suggestion: technology and wowwee segways do zero for the half of the world barely existing on 2 dollars US a day. the world's REAL problems cannot be solved through the massive application of technology and swanky graphics.
we learned from the utopian-hippies-cum-yuppie-mega-shoppers that you cannot effect the world by isolating yourself from it. but that is exactly what this exhibit does: isolates a culture from world reality by cocooning it in a hyper-tech-benevolent fantasy. dream on.
this exhibit should NOT be held in an art gallery. it is fundamentally superficial, shallow, commercial, conformist, banal and boring (beneath the glitter). if this is how deep one of our most respected design thinkers is willing to go, the rest of the world (because WE are doing just fine, right?) is well and truly fucked. if you get the feeling you are walking through a commercial, it is because you are. they are selling our consciences back in neat little packages.

Ouch.. actually, I think the water treatment container they showed in the exhibit cost about 60 dollars and provided water for hundreds of people. That was kind of the point. I think your view (obviously negative) shows a lot of the fallacies in the exhibit, but presumably the whole point of the exhibit was "this is what's going on right now. I think this stuff is good, what else can we do to make it better?"