The Value of Good Design Words Alexis Romano
MoMA’s musings on the value of good design reinforce the taste-making role it has enjoyed for at least half a century, but is it time for the museum’s understanding of design to be reframed? “Good Design is not a label or a price tag. Good Design is international both in origin and appeal. Good Design is a statement and not a gadget. Good Design need not be costly. Good Design is neither a book of etiquette nor a social register. Good Design is one that achieves integrity. Good Design depends on the harmony established between the form of an object and its use.” The above manifesto probably strikes a familiar tone: the notion of “good design” it describes is thoroughly ingrained in our collective memory and experience, even if many might struggle to trace the origins or rationale behind its tenets. The manifesto features in a new exhibition at MoMA in New York, The Value of Good Design, which attempts to trace this development: it considers good design as it was conceived in the inter- and postwar periods in various global centres, but largely bases its narrative around the museum’s own efforts to codify and disseminate this vision. Exhibition curators Juliet Kinchin and Andrew Gardner have drawn heavily on the museum’s vast collection, and filled the gallery with a panoply of domestic furnishings and appliances, textile and graphic designs, transport designs, sporting goods, ceramics, glass, toys and electronics, spanning the mundane and familiar to the singular and eye-catching. Not many exhibitions succeed in juxtaposing objects as varied as an ordinary broomstick – a model manufactured by Stanley Home Products in 1955 – and the Cinquecento, or “500F
city car”, designed by Dante Giacosa in 1957, but by placing focus on the “democratizing potential of design”, as an introductory wall text explains, Kinchin and Gardner have strived to assess these objects’ value in social and economic frameworks. Aided by archival documentation, photographs and videos, visitors are meant to question their definition of good design and scrutinise their own functional and aesthetic relationships to it. Since the inception of MoMA’s industrial design department in 1934, the museum has tested the line between art and commerce in formulating its definition of good design. Essentially, good design is functional, cost-effective and aesthetically pleasing. This dual consideration of form and function exposes, among other things, the Bauhaus connection of Eliot Noyes, an industrial designer who served as the first director of the department having previously worked under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. In 1946, Noyes left the museum and was replaced by Edgar Kaufmann Jr, whose background was as an architect and department-store merchandiser. Quickly, the department merged exhibiting and collecting with activities providing a platform for contemporary design, manufacture and retailing. Competition-based shows, such as Organic Design in Home Furnishings (1940-41), brought together designers and manufacturers, while exhibitions such as Useful Household Objects (1938-48), the museum’s annual pre-Christmas show, partnered with retailers and doubled as a shopping guide for consumers. The museum’s Good Design series (1950-55), meanwhile,
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was co-organised with the Chicago-based wholesaler Merchandise Mart. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression and Second World War, consumerism under MoMA’s watch increasingly assumed a moral and patriotic dimension, as the public was encouraged to purchase domestic objects based on values like practicality, honesty and simplicity. These ideas shifted in the context of the Cold War, as design became fraught with other symbols of American identity, from the domestic comforts of suburbia and the centrality of the nuclear family, to democracy and capitalism. On the international stage, good design became a tool of cultural diplomacy, showcased in international exhibitions and Marshall Plan initiatives, and was used to spread US values to counter Soviet ideals. These programmes fuelled US-international relations, from the 1945 creation of the government Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs to MoMA’s 1955 Europe-destined exhibition, 50 Years of American Art, which featured mass-produced industrial design items alongside painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, typography, and film. Of the latter, art historian Gay McDonald has written that the US government and MoMA “came to view such wares as a vital means of quelling French fears of American cultural homogenization and of building support for the American way of life”. These narratives have since been internalised, spread in part by MoMA’s exhibitions, as well as its Design Store, which continues to sell historical items. The new exhibition introduces visitors to MoMA’s above-mentioned historical initiatives, casting the museum as a central