Bill Moggridge Named New Director of Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
By STAN PARCHIN
January 6, 2010
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| Bill Moggridge. Photograph courtesy of IDEO/Nicolas Zurcher. |
The Smithsonian Institution's
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York announced today the appointment of Bill Moggridge as its new Director, effective March 2010. He succeeds Paul Thompson, who left the museum in July 2009 to become the Rector or President of the Royal College of Art in London.
EducationBill Moggridge studied industrial design at the Central School of Design in London, from where he graduated in 1965. He returned to the United Kingdom to study typography and communications before establishing his consulting business in 1969.
ExperienceMoggridge is best known as the designer of the Grid Compass, the first laptop computer, in 1980. He co-founded IDEO, a renowned innovation and design firm, in 1991. Since 2000, Moggridge has written books, produced videos and given presentations. The author has been a consulting associate professor in the design program at Stanford University since 2005. He received the Cooper-Hewitt's Lifetime Achievement Award for Design at the White House in 2009.
New ResponsibilitiesMr. Moggridge will oversee the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's $64 million expansion, begun in 2006. The renovation includes an 60 percent increase in exhibition space, the construction of a new library and the establishment of additional classrooms for the institution's master's degree program.
Wayne Clough, Smithsonian Secretary, said, "Bill Moggridge is an entrepreneur, innovator and visionary leader in the design world. The Smithsonian and Cooper-Hewitt are poised on the edge of a new era and having Bill Moggridge as Director of our national design museum offers exciting prospects for the future."