Good Design Award (Museum of Modern Art)


The Good Design Awards was an industrial design program organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in cooperation with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. The awards were given in the context of the exhibition series Good Design held from 1950 to 1955.

History

The awards were part of the exhibition series Good Design, which were spearheaded by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who was then director of the Industrial Design Department of MOMA. Predecessors to this series were two other exhibition series on modernist design, one titled Useful Objects Under $5, the other a series of international design competitions. An agreement to launch the Good Design exhibition series was struck between Rene d'Harnoncourt, director of MoMA, and Wallace O. Ollman, general manager of the Merchandise Mart. Good Design had five editions:
The Museum of Modern Art developed a circular Good Design tag, designed by Morton and Millie Goldsholl of Chicago, which manufacturers of products chosen for exhibition could use in advertising and sales. Critic Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times called this tag a "version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval", and compared it to efforts of similar institutions like V&A in the UK or Bauhaus in Germany in promoting modernist design.
MoMA has staged retrospective exhibitions called What Was Good Design and The Value of Good Design.