Bill Moggridge of IDEO is bringing his design-savvy to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum
By Erin Weber
In the spring of 2005, I was on the cusp of graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a passion for design, but little exposure to the professional design field. Enter Bill Moggridge. As one of the founders of IDEO, Moggridge came to our school to present on the non-traditional design work IDEO was doing and the interdisciplinary design teams they gathered to inspire innovation. I was hooked, not only on tracking the work of IDEO, but also on the potential, pervasive reach of design as a discipline. Recently, Moggridge was appointed as the new director of the Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum, where his unique view on design will hopefully reach many more young designers.
During the five subsequent years since that presentation, Moggridge has been a busy participant in the design community writing books, teaching, remaining an active advisor at IDEO and accepting honors such as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Awards hosted at the White House. One of Moggridge’s greatest professional strengths is that his decades of expertise in design have evolved with the changing times. Most recently, he has written two timely books: Designing Interactions (2006) and Designing Media (2010). Appropriately, Designing Interactions is itself an example of his thesis regarding “designing media” in that the book marries traditional text with an accompanying DVD and website that enhances the content through the different mediums.
Moggridge’s professional design experience and timely thought leadership will bring a fresh perspective to his new role as director at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum which begins this month. I hope that through the museum, Moggridge is able to open the minds of the general public to see the diverse value of design, as he did for me at the start of my career.
You can read more about Moggridge’s appointment in this New York Times article.
