Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.

Paola Antonelli is one of the world’s foremost experts on architecture and design. She’s also one of its main evangelists, pushing the concepts of physical design toward the mainstream through her work as a senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By watching the field closely, Antonelli has become a master at highlighting the most relevant and pressing developments of design as it relates to the real world. Her exhibition last year, Talk to Me, focused on the interactivity of design and how people connect with the common things around them. The city, being a collection of people and things, was an underlying theme throughout the exhibition.

And city design issues can be expected to come up in future MoMA exhibitions, as Antonelli was recently named the museum’s first director of research. This new position will essentially put her in charge of doing what she already does best: Finding the best and brightest emerging ideas that are shaping modern art and the world around us. Given her expertise in architecture, design and cities, it’s easy to be excited about what she’ll find.

Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.