For the nearly thirty years between 1947 and 1971, that Ingeborg Lundin designed glassware for Sweden’s Orrefors glassworks, her designs were  prized for their originality, simplicity and grace. Founded in 1898, Orrefors originally manufactured bottles, window glass, and tableware. In 1914, the firm started to produce cut crystal, and by 1925 had become internationally renowned...

Saara Hopea (later Saara Hopea-Untracht) began her career as a furniture and lamp designer, but started designing glassware in about 1952, at a time when Finnish design was gaining prominence on the world stage for its strong attention to materials and sense of organic form in a modern idiom. Kaj Frank, Hopea’s former teacher at...

In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. This cuff-like bracelet with large oval stone clasp was designed by Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe in 1968. It is made of silver and rutilated smoky quartz. The bracelet’s simple form is emblematic of Torun’s philosophy that jewelry should...

Stainless Steel Gloss was designed by Reiko Sudo, one of Japan’s most important contemporary textile designers. Educated at Musashino Art University, she and Junichi Arai were the co-founders in 1984 of the Japanese company and store, NUNO, which produces textiles of extraordinary ingenuity and beauty. Sudo and the other designers at NUNO combine tradition and...

This is the fourth interview in Chapter 3 in my new book, Designing Media Bob Mason & Jeremy Merle, November 2008 Bob Mason cofounded Brightcove in 2004 with Jeremy Allaire. They saw the possibility of a complete end-to-end solution to deliver video from any creator to any customer, across diverse devices, allowing content owners to...

This is the second in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media Mark Zuckerberg, November 2009 Mark stares at you from the cover of this week’s Time Magazine with intense green eyes. Here is Time’s accolade: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for...

  This past weekend was a terrific Cynthia Rowley/Johnson & Johnson extravaganza at Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Cynthia’s show at Lincoln Center was downright gorgeous, with stunning skirts perforated with geometric shapes and cabochon-covered fabrics with transparent cardigans and gauzy stockings. I sat behind Rebecca Romjin and Alan Cumming, which was fun, despite being...

Over the next two weeks on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Blog, students from an interdisciplinary graduate-level course on the Triennial taught by the Triennial curatorial team blog their impressions and inspirations of the current exhibition,‘Why Design Now?’.     What does it mean to want everyone to have access to knowledge about everything businesses and government...

Over the next two weeks on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Blog, students from an interdisciplinary graduate-level course on the Triennial taught by the Triennial curatorial team blog their impressions and inspirations of the current exhibition,‘Why Design Now?’.   Joe Gebbia is a San Francisco-based industrial designer and self-described “designtrepreneur,” as well as founding partner of the...