Sep 30, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 13 segments
Tanner Woodford is a Chicago-based designer, artist, and founder of Iterative Work. He previously served for fourteen years as founding executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. Listen in…
Alex SanchezHost
You talked about how you and your peers like sat down and had a conversation about what was needed in Chicago.
I'm having a hard time verbalizing it now because I couldn't in the moment.
I got this from Helen Goldenberg, who was a board member of ours during COVID.
And she said, isn't it amazing how the city of Chicago itself is a design museum? Every neighborhood is its own exhibition.
And Chicago, it feels so obvious that it needs a design museum and almost offensive that we don't have one.
And then we started to see the design museum as a tool for solving problems within the city.
We started to see that once we weren't just the museum on the hill, but we were a pop-up museum in the public's way.
People started to see us sort of integrated into their daily lives and not something that they needed to go seek to find.
We encouraged unhoused people to visit and we saw them around as well as people that had means.
People from all walks of political life, every age, like there were days we'd walk through the museum And you would see literally an infant next to a 99-year-old.
The way the public kind of embraced that, the idea of design made it so obvious in retrospect that it was missing here.
And I would say in the moment, it was like, well, Chicago has everything, but also Chicago needs everything.
And I had a little bit of experience with a museum in a pop-up sort of fashion.
You talked about how you and your peers like sat down and had a conversation about what was needed in Chicago.
I'm having a hard time verbalizing it now because I couldn't in the moment.
I got this from Helen Goldenberg, who was a board member of ours during COVID.
And she said, isn't it amazing how the city of Chicago itself is a design museum? Every neighborhood is its own exhibition.
And Chicago, it feels so obvious that it needs a design museum and almost offensive that we don't have one.
And then we started to see the design museum as a tool for solving problems within the city.
We started to see that once we weren't just the museum on the hill, but we were a pop-up museum in the public's way.
People started to see us sort of integrated into their daily lives and not something that they needed to go seek to find.
We encouraged unhoused people to visit and we saw them around as well as people that had means.
People from all walks of political life, every age, like there were days we'd walk through the museum And you would see literally an infant next to a 99-year-old.
The way the public kind of embraced that, the idea of design made it so obvious in retrospect that it was missing here.
And I would say in the moment, it was like, well, Chicago has everything, but also Chicago needs everything.
And I had a little bit of experience with a museum in a pop-up sort of fashion.
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