help our country?” Both Maeda and Moggridge
are seen as “renegades,” says Debbie Millman,
president of the design division at Sterling
Brands and past president of AIGA, “coming
into two very established institutions, and being
tasked with shaking things up.” Maeda has suffered a backlash since his arrival at RISD in 2008,
absorbing a vote of no confidence from the faculty earlier this year. The predicament that he
and his institution now find themselves in may
be a cautionary tale for the Cooper-Hewitt and
Moggridge. “It’s like, be careful what you wish
for,” says Millman.
people gather, but in fact, the idea that the Smithsonian Institution would bring professional
associations together that are principally advocate organizations—the Smithsonian would not
like that. There are elements like that where his
intentions are good, but he hasn’t quite figured
out what it means to be part of this behemoth.”
Of course, the Cooper-Hewitt already has
one national platform to build upon that does
not conflict with the Smithsonian. Casting itself
as arbiter of the design industry with the launch
of the National Design Awards, in 2000, was a
coup. The awards have elevated the museum’s
national profile and given it a significant
amount of credibility in the industry. This, in
turn, has attracted major business players to
its board of trustees who bring with them significant corporate support that is enabling the
museum to expand its ambitions. “In a nonprofit arena, you may have a great idea, but how
are we going to fund it?” says Beth Comstock,
chief marketing officer of GE and president of
the Cooper-Hewitt’s board. “That’s been an eye-opener for me. I think one of the things I’ve been
able to bring as a perspective is, ‘Wow, that’s
fundable,’ or ‘Someone would sponsor that.’ ”
Comstock was brought to the board by Michael
Francis, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Target. In 2003, Target won
the National Design Award for Corporate
Achievement. In 2006, the company endowed
the museum’s Target Education Center, which
hosts seminars, high-school programs, and
workshops. Francis is now vice president of the
museum’s board of trustees. “Design innovation,
for Target, has been a critical aspect of our differentiation strategy,” he says. “That syncs up
beautifully with the Cooper-Hewitt’s mission,
which is really to celebrate the impact of design,
beyond aesthetic, and that shared commitment
ultimately led us down a path of collaboration.”
Moggridge is seen as someone who can engineer these valuable connections between the
museum and the business world—particularly
in tech, where his name carries weight. “Bill
knows all the people in the TED community,”
says John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island
School of Design and a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt, who invited Moggridge to deliver the
commencement speech at RISD this year. “If he
knows, like, a Flickr person, or a Google person,
or a You Tube person, he can say, ‘Hey, I’ve got
this really cool museum, and you’re American,
so come on board!’ How can you not want to
“don’t underestimate
bill,” says Ideo’s david kelley.
“when he’s committed
to an idea, he’ll make it
happen. there’ll be
people who’ll be dying to
do things for him.”
at the museum, the hope seems to be that Mog-
gridge will act as a brand ambassador during
this period of transition. His name was not in
the air while the search committee was inter-
viewing candidates. The names that people
heard were those of the more usual suspects:
Antonelli at MoMA; Betsky of the Cincinnati Art
Museum; Robbins of Syracuse; Maeda of RISD;
Alice Rawsthorn, former director of the Design
Museum in London. “I remember on a number
of occasions sitting around over drinks with
people, speculating about who it would be,” says
Pentagram’s Bierut. “And then it came up on the
Metropolis blog, and I thought, Oh, of course—if
he would do it. There’s a kind of rightness to it.
He plays the part well. And I can tell you, from
experience, that if you ask businesspeople to
name a design firm, if they can name one, Ideo
is the one they can come up with.”
David Kelley, who cofounded Ideo with Mog-
gridge and Mike Nuttall, in 1991, and who also
founded the “d. school” at Stanford University,
was already sitting on the Cooper-Hewitt’s edu-
cation advisory board before Moggridge was
hired. “There were questions about [how] he’s
never run a museum before, he’s not a fundraiser,
he doesn’t have a lot of the skills that the con-
ventional museum director would have,” ex-
plains Kelley. “But what they didn’t know, which
I knew, was that people want to be around Bill
and work for Bill. So all those things he can’t do,
there’ll be people who’ll be dying to do those for
him. Don’t underestimate Bill. When he’s com-
mitted to an idea—the content, not the organiza-
tion, but the content—he’ll make it happen.”
If Moggridge is about as far as you can get
from someone with administrative experience
at a museum, his associate director, Caroline
Baumann, is 180 degrees in the other direction.
Having spent the past decade at the Cooper-
Hewitt, she served as acting director before
Moggridge was appointed. Baumann is crisp
and relentlessly on message, with data at her
fingertips or on the tip of her tongue, while Mog-
gridge prefers to paint the big picture. “Which
is where the dream ticket comes into play,” says
Paul Thompson, who left the Cooper-Hewitt in
2009 to head the Royal College of Art, in London.
“Caroline is fulfilling that operational role, which
allows Bill to be the creative director.”
Many people seem to see Moggridge in almost
messianic terms, bringing the word of design
down from the mountaintop for the masses. But
while his admirers and supporters—and he has
a lot of them—are cheering and campaigning for
him, Moggridge’s own style is not to galvanize
crowds with stirring speeches. He is quiet and
thoughtful. He is iterative out loud. What that
means is that he is willing to speculate, to try on
and discard ideas if they don’t seem to fit or fly.
He is willing to “embrace failure,” as he puts it,
which is one of his most dearly held mantras. This
is the design method he is known for, and in his
view, this is “the way forward toward a good solu-
tion.” But this is quite different from the typical
head of an organization reciting the party line.
“They’re always trying to sell it,” he says, with a
shrug. As Moggridge cheerfully goes off-roading,
you sometimes detect, among those around him,
a barely checked desire to wrench the wheel back.
