Good Design

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Good Design is the name of a series of exhibitions organised by New York's Museum of Modern Art between 1950 and 1955 and, more generally, of an idea that dominated the postwar years in Europe and America: that there is a "right" design, made of forms that are simple, functional, honest in their materials and durable, and that the task of museums, schools and governments is to teach the public to recognise and choose it.

The MoMA and Merchandise Mart exhibitions

The Good Design programme was the initiative of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., director of MoMA's industrial design department. The son of the owner of a large Pittsburgh department store, for whom Frank Lloyd Wright had built Fallingwater, Kaufmann knew retail well: back in 1940 he had proposed to the museum the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition, won by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. For Good Design, MoMA teamed up with Chicago's Merchandise Mart, the huge centre where furniture manufacturers presented their new lines to retailers. Each year a selection of furniture, lamps, tableware, textiles and appliances, chosen from products actually on sale, was shown in Chicago and New York. The aim was not to celebrate one-off pieces but to steer consumers' taste and manufacturers' choices towards an affordable modernism, that of Charles and Ray Eames, Organic design and Scandinavian design.

A battle against styling

Behind Good Design lay a specific polemic: against American commercial styling, the chrome and aerodynamic shapes of Streamlining applied just to sell, the car tailfins changed every year. Good design, by contrast, derived from the tradition of the Deutscher Werkbund, the Bauhaus and Functionalism: form arises from function, superfluous ornament is to be avoided, a good object does not go out of fashion.

Gute Form, Council of Industrial Design, Compasso d'Oro

In those same years the same idea spread everywhere. In Germany people spoke of Gute Form: the term caught on with Max Bill's book Die gute Form (1957) and became the model for Braun and the Ulm school. In Britain the Council of Industrial Design, founded in 1944 and now the Design Council, organised the Britain Can Make It exhibition in 1946 and opened London's Design Centre in 1956, after the wartime experience of Utility Furniture. In Italy the Compasso d'Oro was born in 1954, promoted by La Rinascente on an idea by Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli; in Japan, in 1957, the G-Mark.

Critiques and legacy

By the late 1960s Good Design was being accused of being dogmatic, cold and bourgeois: Pop design, Radical design and then Postmodernism claimed colour, irony, kitsch, the right to bad taste. Yet the idea never disappeared. The ten principles of good design of Dieter Rams, the Braun designer, which end with "as little design as possible", in German Weniger, aber besser, "less, but better", are still a reference today and have inspired products such as those of Apple. And the awards born in those years continue to say, every year, what a good design is.