The New Design Museum: Co-creating the Present, Prototyping the Future

Explores how design and architecture museums have adapted to face contemporary concerns.

The New Design Museum brings together theories and voices from leading international institutions and independent initiatives addressing the transformed––and continually transforming––nature of design in the twenty-first century and its planetary scope in both practical and discursive dimensions. By mapping a new landscape of institutional practices across different geographical locations, it reveals how spaces of culture dedicated to design need transformation—of their missions, programs, and outreach platforms—to respond to an ever-expanding outlook on design as a field that is moving beyond its traditional presentation as an object-based practice. 

The book integrates essays by Beatrice Leanza, fifteen interviews with directors and programmers—such as Carson Chan (MoMA, New York), Ikko Yokoyama (M+ Museum, Hong Kong), Aric Chen (Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam), Giovanna Borasi (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal), and Lucia Pietroiusti (Serpentine Gallery, London)—and seventeen case studies that encompass independent organizations and platforms offering evidence of the changing paradigms of public and professional engagement with the discipline of design. The World Around (Brooklyn, NY), African Futures Institute (Accra, Ghana), Cultures of Assembly (Luxembourg), Loudreaders, Instituto A Gente Transforma (Sao Paolo, Brasil), and Fundación Organizmo (Colombia), and others explore global design practices invested in decolonizing and queering agency, as well as computational, ecological, and Indigenous knowledge, and present alternative educational and collaborative frameworks of institutional development.

The New Design Museum ultimately examines the critical role of cultural institutions as engines for knowledge production, where a democratic politics of mutual care and shared purpose can be explored and exercised.

Beatrice Leanza is a cultural strategist, museum director, and critic with a background in Asian studies. She served as executive director of the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon, as director of the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne,  and as creative director of Beijing Design Week. She is co-founder of The Global School, China’s first independent institute dedicated to design and creative research.