The Design Museum of Chicago is a museum of design in the Chicago loop. It was founded in 2012 as a pop-up museum, and hosted exhibitions in different venues around Chicago in 2012 and 2013. Following a successful Kickstartercrowdfunding campaign in 2014, the museum opened a permanent location in the Block 37 building. In late 2018, the museum moved to Expo 72.
Mission and purpose
The mission of the Design Museum of Chicago is to "educate, inspire, and innovate through design." Its programs are collaborative and community-based, largely relying on local volunteers for exhibit design, curation, registration, marketing, and other core museological functions. With a small staff, its foundation is "in its many volunteers' visions and labor." The museum is a non-profit 501 organization that believes design has the capacity to fundamentally improve the human condition. It fosters free, open, and honest engagement with diverse audiences through a permanent collection, rotating exhibitions, and educational programming.
The Chicago Design Market is "a rotating series of pop-up shops that create the unexpected by placing small emerging artists alongside larger established businesses. Located on the third floor of Block 37, "shops are not charged for utilities and do not pay a fixed monthly rent. Instead, the museum takes a sales commission. This allows small designers or businesses, such as Aviate Press, to market in a retail space, while allowing larger establishments, such as Cards Against Humanity, to experiment with both the space and their business model." Stores are selected via an application process. They include: Cards Against Humanity, The Colossal Shop, You Are Beautiful, Fourneau Bread Oven, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Resketch, Sweetwater Foundation, Shawnimals, Aviate Press, AIA Chicago, Dock 6 Collective and mercer & winnie.
The Design Pack is a Cards Against Humanity expansion pack that includes 30 illustrated cards that interpret George Carlin's infamous 1972 monologue, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." All proceeds from the Design Pack benefit the Design Museum of Chicago, with sales surpassing $130,000 in its first few days on the market. Similar non-profit packs by Cards Against Humanity have raised nearly millions of dollars for partner organizations DonorsChoose.org, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Sunlight Foundation. Contributors to the Design Pack include Laura Park, Shawna X, Chad Kouri, Susan Kare, Yann Legendre, Paula Scher, Jay Ryan, Mike McQuade, Paul Octavious, Erik Spiekermann, Max Temkin, Debbie Millman, Art Paul, Simon Whybray, Mike Mitchell, Scott Thomas, Matthew Terdich, Jez Burrows, Jason Polan, Jessica Hische, Cody Hudson, Nick Adam, Matthew Hoffman, Magdalena Wistuba + Anna Mort, Eric Hu, Olly Moss, Tanner Woodford, Milton Glaser, and Sonnenzimmer.
