Good Design Award (Museum of Modern Art)
The Good Design exhibition series was an industrial design program organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, in cooperation with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, held between 1950 and 1955. No awards were granted to designers whose work was put on view in these exhibitions, despite misinformation suggesting otherwise. History. The exhibition series "Good Design" was 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, including a series that began  with "Useful Objects Under $5" (later the maximum price climbed to $10 and eventually $100), 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" (2011) and "The Value of Good Design" (2019).