Introduction

This report examines the evolving representation of women designers through three landmark Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibitions spanning more than 60 years: “Good Design” (1950-1955), “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen” (2010), and “Designing Modern Women” (1890-1990) (2013). Through network analysis, we investigate the complex relationships between designers, exhibitions, movements, countries, and manufacturers to understand how institutional recognition of women designers has evolved.

The visualization of these networks, accessible through our interactive platform at Design Network Visualization, reveals patterns of inclusion and exclusion and the crucial connective roles that women designers played in developing modernist design. Our analysis demonstrates how women designers were vital bridges between different design movements, materials, and geographies, despite their historical marginalization in institutional contexts.

Dataset

This dataset represents a comprehensive network analysis of women designers in major MoMA exhibitions between 1950-2013. It includes structured data files mapping the connections between designers, exhibitions, countries, manufacturers, movements, and schools, with special attention to gender representation and attribution patterns.

Dataset Contents

The collection includes:

• Edge CSV Files: Relational data showing connections between different entities
  • Designer-to-Designer relationships
  • Designer-to-Country connections
  • Designer-to-Exhibition participation
  • Designer-to-Manufacturer affiliations
  • Designer-to-Movement associations
  • Designer-to-School connections
• Node CSV File: Comprehensive information on all entities in the network, including:
  • Basic identification data
  • Gender information for designers
  • Geographic information
  • Active time periods
  • Design categories
  • Node type classification
  • Data Visualization Files
• Mid-Century Designers.csv: Primary Tableau-ready dataset including:
  • Designer name and gender
  • Specific design objects and their subcategories
  • Country of origin
  • Manufacturer information
  • Year of creation
  • Exhibition history and citation information
  • Complete exhibition listings

Visualization Development and Analysis Process

The visualization approach was iteratively refined through a structured peer review process using a matrix-based effort/return framework. This collaborative evaluation identified high-value visualization priorities, including network analysis (connecting designers, styles, and countries), geographic mapping, and designer image integration. Professor Chris Alen Sula also helped me decide on the topic to focus on after juggling between the Modern Century and Women’s distribution focus. These insights directly shaped my implementation decisions by prioritizing network visualization while establishing a clear roadmap for future enhancements like Sankey diagrams and heatmap matrices. This process ensured that visualization decisions were driven by analytical value rather than technical preference.

Methodology

This data was compiled through:

• Systematic review of MoMA exhibition catalogs and checklists using Phyton, OpenRefine and ClaudeAi to assist with coding issue
• Analysis of curatorial documentation
• Review of designer biographies and career information through MoMA Collection and Archive, Wikipedia, and Vitra Design Museum Collection
• Standardization of relationship types and entity categories

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Exhibition Overview

Good Design (1950-1955)

Directed by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the “Good Design” exhibition series represented MoMA’s authoritative effort to define mid-century design excellence for American consumers and manufacturers. Held semi-annually from 1950 to 1955, these exhibitions established “good design” criteria, emphasizing functionality, innovation, and aesthetic qualities derived from modernist principles.

However, our analysis reveals a significant gender imbalance in these exhibitions, with women designers representing only 13.04% (12 out of 92) of featured designers. This disparity occurred despite the active presence of innovative women designers during this period, including Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Greta Magnusson Grossman. The exhibition’s emphasis on furniture, lighting, and architectural products—categories where women designers faced greater institutional barriers—contributed to this imbalance.

Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (2010)

Curated by Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, “Counter Space” examined the twentieth-century transformation of the kitchen as a site of design innovation, technological advancement, and social change. Featuring approximately 300 works from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition centered on Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s revolutionary “Frankfurt Kitchen” (1926-27), which was acquired by MoMA in 2009.

While the exhibition focused on spaces traditionally associated with women’s labor, our analysis indicates that it featured primarily the work of one woman designer (Schütte-Lihotzky), representing 6.67% of identified designers. This paradox—examining domestic spaces while continuing to marginalize women designers—reflects the ongoing challenges in fully integrating women’s contributions into design history narratives. There might be some thoughts on “Women design kitchen, Men design the rest,” that we need to avoid.

Designing Modern Women (1890-1990) (2013)

Also curated by Juliet Kinchin and Luke Baker, “Designing Modern Women” represented a significant institutional correction in recognizing women’s contributions to modern design. The exhibition featured work by 28 women designers exclusively, examining their roles as designers, collaborators, and directors of design firms over a century of modern design.

Our analysis shows this exhibition created a crucial space for examining women’s multifaceted design contributions across disciplines, including furniture, textiles, ceramics, and exhibition design. By highlighting designers like Aino Aalto, Eileen Gray, Eva Zeisel, Emily Belding, Ray Eames, and Greta Magnusson Grossman, the exhibition challenged traditional hierarchies that had marginalized women’s work and revealed their centrality to modernist design development.

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Networks and Connections

The interactive network visualization tool allows users to:

1. Explore connections between designers, countries, schools, manufacturers, exhibitions, and movements (Based on the groups)
2. Highlight specific women designers’ networks and connections by ‘search’ tab
3. Toggle between geographical, chronological, and relationship-based views
4. Examine detailed attribution information for specific design objects

This platform transforms complex relational data into accessible visual patterns, revealing connections that might remain obscured in traditional design history narratives.

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Findings

Geographic Distribution

North America (50 designers total, with 23 women) and Northern Europe (32 designers total, with 13 women) demonstrate the strongest representation of women designers, reflecting both MoMA’s location and the significant role of Scandinavian design in promoting women’s professional advancement.

Movement Connections

Women designers show significant connections to nodes representing “Scandinavian Design,” “Domestic Design,” and “Kitchen Design,” while having fewer direct connections to “Mid-Century Modern” and “International Style” nodes, revealing how gendered categorization affected institutional recognition. Please note that the main nodes that pull most of the nodes are the exhibition nodes.

Collaborative Relationships

Several key women designers, including Aino Aalto, Ray Eames, and Eva Zeisel (with Francis E. Blodgett), have their signature works explicitly labeled as collaborations with male partners, highlighting attribution challenges women designers faced in receiving recognition for their contributions.

Exhibition Evolution

The striking shift from 86.96% male representation in “Good Design” to 100% female representation in “Designing Modern Women” reflects MoMA’s institutional evolution over six decades—from near-exclusion to specialized inclusion to focused recognition. Please note that between the six decades, there were also other exhibitions with a ‘Design’ theme, for example, the “Value of Good Design.”

Centrality Measures

Our network analysis shows that certain women designers demonstrate high betweenness centrality, functioning as crucial bridges between different design communities, countries, and movements despite their historical marginalization.⁹

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Bias & Limitations

The network analysis of women designers in MoMA exhibitions presents several significant limitations that should be acknowledged:

Data Selection and Availability Constraints

• Exhibition Documentation Gaps: The historical “Good Design” exhibitions (1950-1955) have less comprehensive documentation than more recent exhibitions, potentially causing underrepresentation of certain designers, particularly those with minor contributions.
• Attribution Inconsistency: MoMA’s historical attribution practices often credited male partners or firms rather than individual women designers, making it challenging to identify all women contributors accurately.
• Collection Policy Influence: MoMA’s collection policies shape our analysis, which historically prioritized certain design categories, geographies, and aesthetics while marginalizing others.

Methodological Limitations

• Network Simplification: Our visualization reduces complex professional relationships to binary connections, potentially obscuring nuanced collaborations, influences, and power dynamics.
• Definition Boundaries: Categorizing entities as “designers,” “manufacturers,” or “schools” requires subjective decisions, mainly when individuals function across multiple roles.
• Language Barriers: Our primary data collection relied on English-language sources, potentially underrepresenting designers from non-English-speaking regions whose work was less thoroughly documented in MoMA’s English-language records.

Interpretation Constraints

• Contemporary Perspective: We analyze historical gender dynamics through contemporary understandings of gender equity and recognition, potentially misinterpreting historical actors’ perspectives on their work and roles.
• Success Bias: Focusing on women designers who achieved some degree of recognition through MoMA exhibitions, we underrepresent those completely excluded from institutional recognition.
• Institutional Focus: Centering MoMA as the primary arbiter of design importance reinforces the authority of Western, particularly American, institutions in defining design history.
• Eurocentrism: Overrepresentation of European and North American designers reflects MoMA’s collection priorities and Western-centric design history narratives.

Technical Constraints

• Visualization Limitations: Network visualization techniques require simplifying temporal relationships into static representations, potentially suggesting simultaneity where significant time lags existed.
• Missing Dimensions: Our two-dimensional visualization cannot fully represent the multiple, simultaneous relationships between entities, including temporal evolution, relationship types, and relative influence. I also find it hard to find the code to change the group naming.
• Time Constraints: Due to academic demands across multiple courses, our analysis lacks the depth of primary source engagement to strengthen the conclusions.

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Future Research Plans

Building on our current network analysis of women designers in MoMA exhibitions, we identify four high-priority research directions:

1. Enhanced Network Visualization Interactivity

Resolve the technical limitations in our Sigma.js implementation to create a more responsive, user-friendly network visualization. Specific improvements would include: implementing smooth zoom and pan controls, developing category-based filtering capabilities, adding hover/click information panels for detailed node data, and optimizing performance for complex filtering operations. These enhancements would transform the visualization from a static representation to a truly interactive research tool accessible to scholars and general audiences

2. Multi-exhibition Comparative Analysis

Expand our network visualization to include additional MoMA design exhibitions from the 1980s to the 2010s to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how women designers’ representation evolved during this crucial institutional reassessment centered around ‘design’ theme exhibitions. This would reveal patterns in how curatorial approaches shifted over time and identify potential turning points in institutional recognition.

3. Geographic Expansion Analysis

Investigate why certain geographic regions (Scandinavia, North America) have a stronger representation of women designers than others. Examine how regional design cultures, educational systems, and professional structures either supported or hindered women’s design careers, creating a comparative framework for understanding institutional contexts.

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REFERENCE

• Museum of Modern Art. “Good Design.” Exhibition records, 1950-1955. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
• Museum of Modern Art. “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen.” Exhibition website, 2010-2011. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1033
• Museum of Modern Art. “Designing Modern Women 1890–1990.” Exhibition website, 2013-2014. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1369
• Kinchin, Juliet, and Aidan O’Connor. Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. Exhibition catalog. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011.
• Buckley, Cheryl. “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design.” Design Issues 3, no. 2 (1986): 3-14.
• Kirkham, Pat, ed. Women Designers in the USA, 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
• Design Network Visualization Dataset. Compiled from MoMA exhibition records. https://kianoding.github.io/design-network-viz/network/
• Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.