Palo Alto in 1979 to open a second office of his London design firm. He speaks the language of
design in terms of the marketplace of ideas and solutions, the lingua franca of TED conferences
rather than the fortresses of culture. After decades in the industry, during which he taught
and also published two books of interviews, Designing Interactions and Designing Media, “I got
more interested in telling stories about design,” he says. “And this was a more natural platform
for telling these stories.”
What’s different now is that the museum gives him a far bigger platform. “We have five
different audiences,” he says of the Cooper-Hewitt, ticking them off on his fingers. “There’s
the leadership audience—we can help every leader in America figure out how to solve chal-
lenges using design methods and processes. And then kids; we have our strong educational
program for K– 12, with 400-plus lesson plans. There’s the current audience, trustees, the
people who come to every show. There’s the general public. And then designers themselves.”
You can’t help but notice that business comes first. For the Cooper-Hewitt, this is a new
development. The museum has its roots in the eccentric obsessions of two 19th-century New
York society ladies, Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt. Their father, Abram S. Hewitt, was the mayor
of the city, and their grandfather, Peter Cooper, was an entrepreneur and philanthropist
who founded Cooper Union as a free school to train working-class artisans and draftsmen.
The sisters collected everything from birdcages to buttons, and they took trips to Europe to
buy objets and tour the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris, which inspired them to create their
own museum. In 1897, the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, holding the
“we can help
every leader In
amerIca fIgure
out how to solve
challenges usIng
desIgn methods,”
says moggrIdge.
Paul Herzan is chairman of the museum’s board
of trustees, which is hoping Moggridge will lead the
National Design Museum into a new era.
sisters’ treasures and dedicated to the memory of
their grandfather, opened on the fourth floor of the
school, in Greenwich Village, where it remained until 1963. At that point, Cooper Union announced that
it no longer had the funds to maintain the museum.
In 1967, the Smithsonian Institution acquired the
collection, on the condition that it remain in New
York, and renamed it the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of
Design. Now it just needed a new home, and the steel
baron Andrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion was available.
Taking up the whole block of Fifth Avenue between
East 90th and East 91st streets, with a wide terrace
and deep garden surrounded by a wrought-iron fence,
the estate seemed well suited to housing a collection
of decorative arts, and, in 1972, it was given to the
Smithsonian by the Carnegie corporation. The Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design opened its doors in 1976,
with a double helix of New York society history now
firmly embedded in its DNA.
The tchotchkes and baubles on which the museum’s reputation was built, though, are not what attract
today’s forward-thinking corporate sponsors and
cutting-edge designers. The challenge for the Cooper-Hewitt is how to accelerate into the future without
leaving behind those who have been along for the
ride since the beginning. The last show at the Cooper-Hewitt, before it closed its doors this summer for a
long-planned two-year renovation, was “Set in Style,”
an exhibition of the jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels. It
was exactly the kind of show that society matrons
adore—and that bores most designers. And yet the
exhibition broke all attendance records for the museum, with 172,000 visitors.
“The lesson there, probably,” says Moggridge, “is
