The program is organized annually by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies.

Good Design was founded in Chicago by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., curator at MoMA, together with Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, as a way to illuminate the most advanced design achievements by the world�s leading industrial and graphic design firms and manufacturers�much as it has today, 60 years later.

In 2009, more than 500 global products and graphic designs won a Good Design Award from more than 35 nations�from China to Turkey; from Singapore to Liechtenstein.

The deadline for the 60th global edition of Good Design is July 1.

�From its modest start in 1950 at The Merchandise Mart in Chicago,� says Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine, museum president, The Chicago Athenaeum, �Good Design has become a ... barometer for the most innovative consumer and domestic products, branding and graphic design on a global scale.

�The original intent behind Good Design as molded by its founders in the 1950s was to introduce modern design to a very reluctant American public that was better acquainted with Chippendale furniture and other traditional, historic styles and antiquated tastes.�

�Good Design became a doctrine,� sais Narkiewicz-Laine.

By 1959, Good Design went global with the first Good Design Show to take place in Milan, Italy.

Each year and well into this decade, innovation and the urge to stretch the envelope became more ambitious by such early firms as Motorola, Knoll, Herman-Miller, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck & Co. and by such modernists as Florence Knoll, Mies van der Rohe, Hannes Wegner, Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Russel Wright and Arne Jacobson.