At Pocket Brainstorm, an interactive station in the newly renovated and expanded Cooper Hewitt museum, I have reached into my pocket and pulled out two objects: a thumb drive and a tube of lip balm. Can they somehow be made to work together?

This is my assignment. It is part of the Cooper Hewitt’s determined attempt to make visitors start thinking like designers, rather than unreflective observers of beautiful things, and the driving force behind the 14 interactive exhibits and features in the reconfigured museum, renamed Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Like a new genetic strand, they have been woven into the building’s DNA to make the brain receptive to design’s sacred mission: the union of form and function.

This transformation begins on the ground floor of the museum’s home, the old Carnegie mansion, in the Process Lab, where visitors encounter the four building blocks of design: defining the problem, getting ideas, developing prototypes and, finally, testing and evaluating. Pocket Brainstorm is one of several stations intended to reinforce the lessons.

“Visitors are used to seeing the final product,” said Kim Robledo-Diga, deputy director for education and interpretation. “The idea here is to get them armed before they go into the galleries so they can say more than, ‘Oh, that looks beautiful to me.’ The grander goal is to get them to think about design in their daily lives.”