“If you’re too dogmatic with your criteria, you won’t be able to work with new categories of design that emerge. If you’re flexible, as we tend to be at MoMA, then you can embrace new categories. What you want is for your criteria to bend, not break,” says Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design. When she was interviewed at Triennale Milano in June 2018, the New York museum's Design Collection had around 5,500 objects. Looking at the section of the website dedicated to the collection, today we find instead 8,062 works (between those documented and published). Browsing the museum's online archive makes us realise just how wide-ranging, expanding and embedded in our lives the contemporary idea of design is. We find not only the great figures in the history of the discipline – from Marcel Breuer to Neri Oxman, via Sottsass and Castiglioni – but also anonymous objects, technical instruments or elements that we would never associate with design, but which have proved important in the evolution of our material culture.
11 unexpected objects from MoMA′s design collection
In the archives of the New York museum there is much more than products designed by masters such as Achille Castiglioni, Charlotte Perriand or Alvar Aalto.
View Article details
- Salvatore Peluso
- 18 December 2021
- New York City
What Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa called “super normal” objects are undoubtedly one of the most interesting categories: they represent all those products that silently surround us, hiding incredible stories and successes. Another set of elements in the collection are those related to the digital transition we are experiencing: if it is normal to identify as “design” a chair, a table or a handle, it is much less easy to consider the tools that define the web as icons, pointers... Paola Antonelli tells us the behind-the-scenes story of each acquisition: “Collecting in a place like MoMA is not something that happens overnight. We basically have to write a treatise on every single object we want to acquire. We have to justify it, document it. Funnily enough, the ‘@’ sign that we acquired in 2010 flew through the acquisition committee like there's no tomorrow. It was more of an internal problem with some of my colleagues, who really could not comprehend the meaning of the ‘acquisition’. Videogames were much harder. They were perceived as a threat to the purity of design and art of the whole MoMA collection.”
On March 30, 1858, Hymen Lipman was granted a patent for creating the first wood-cased pencil with an attached rubber eraser, revolutionizing classrooms and art studios alike. Basically, at one end of the wood casing the lead or graphite is laid in a hollowed out interior groove, forming what would be considered half of a modern pencil. On the other end of the casing a wider groove is carved and a stick of rubber eraser is laid and glued. By constructing the pencil this way either end could be sharpened. Unfortunately, the patent was later revoked by the Supreme Court when it was challenged by a German firm, Faber-Castell, that attached the eraser using a metal ferrule. Lipman invented neither the pencil nor the eraser, he simply combined the two so the invention was considered invalid. Still, Hyman Lipman greatly contributed to the prevailing design of our beloved pencil.
The ice axe is a tool used in alpinism, born of the need to integrate two tools: pole and axe. MoMA’s collection includes an artefact used for the famous ascent of K2 on 31 July 1954. It was made by Grivel, the historic Italian manufacturer of ice axes and crampons and now of other mountaineering equipment, which celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2018.
Exchanging gifts and greetings on holidays is an old and widespread tradition (at least in the Western world). Greeting cards are a seemingly trivial tool, but can be considered a design object. Among the MoMA Collection are those created by US graphic designer Robert Brownjohn for various companies.
The IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) was the first commercial computer (1956) with a magnetic disk memory with moving heads. The computer occupied a room measuring 9x15 m, and was one of the last valve computers built by IBM. Its control panel is preserved at MoMA as a testimony to the emerging "computer age".
One of the most ambitious and effective information design projects ever executed in Britain is the road and motorway signage system designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert from 1957 to 1967. Intellectually rigorous yet inclusive and engaging, their system has become a role model for modern road signage all over the world.
A simple desk fan at MoMA? Yes. Obviously it is no longer in production but you can buy it in various online markets for a few dozen euros.
A product that uniquely interprets an everyday object and has become iconic in its field. A best seller, still on the market today. It has been part of MoMA's permanent design collection since 1977.
The Max Headroom Show is a cult TV series, first broadcast in 1985 and considered to be a pioneer of CG digital entertainment: a symbol of the future and what the computer could create if properly programmed. All this despite the fact that the main character was actually a very well made-up actor. Max Headroom was a prescient look at the instant gratification of the internet age. Recorded in the 1980s, it was set in a future that turned out to be very near.
The unique upside-down teardrop design of the Google Maps Pin was created to be both recognizable and functional, precisely indicating a location without obscuring the area nearby. This ubiquitous digital icon bleeds into real life in the work of artists such as Aram Bartholl, who creates physical Google Maps Pins to mark sites in the material world.
Explaining how AI systems connect and the effect they have on the world is not an easy task. But it’s what professors Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler have attempted to do in this artwork and with an essay.
The scissors "with the orange handle". They are produced by Fiskars, a Finnish brand named after the village where the company was founded in the 19th century (it was originally a cutlery factory). More than a billion of these scissors – designed by Olof Backstrom and now considered a true icon of Nordic design – have been sold worldwide. In addition to the colour, the product's key feature is its ergonomics. The company was the first company in the world to use plastic to make the handles.