Consider your home—wherever, whatever, or whoever it may be for you—and the memories, aspirations, or strong visceral reactions that conjuring this idea might evoke. Thinking about the idea of our own homes is a deeply personal exercise; yet the forces that shape the way we live are a product of a centuries-long construction of the idea of belonging. The emotional and physical aspects of what makes us feel at home have been shaped by powerful and multilayered political, economic, and social factors, which have, in turn, materialized into the design of spaces, ideas, urban systems, legal structures, institutional narratives, and ultimately frameworks of behavior that guide our relationships. In the end, what type of home, nation, and world do we want to build for ourselves?
When it comes to building the systems by which societies function, design plays a crucial role. As the national museum of design, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (CHSDM) has a mission to tell the stories of how design shapes the public and private stages on which our daily lives unfold. It must do so always with the understanding that as a non-neutral agent, design will always be a double-edged tool: both a mechanism that can help us achieve inclusion, acceptance, loyalty, or kinship, and a widely used tactic for exclusion, detachment, and division.
This book—the companion publication to Making Home, Smithsonian Design Triennial—and its contributors address this dualism and the interwoven nature of the ideas of belonging, memory, and utopia; the role that design plays in them; and what they mean for the twenty-first-century United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations in a particularly vulnerable moment in the nation’s history as it approaches the 250th anniversary of its experimental creation. We thank them all, with admiration for the quality and rigor of their scholarship, which has been channeled through the thoughtful design eye of Sunny Park of Park-Langer.
Since their inception in 2000, Smithsonian Design Triennials have operated as moments of pause to critically tackle topics of importance to the nation and the world through a design lens. They have shed light on questions that shape the experience of the world around us. The exhibition component of the Triennial features twenty-five installations within the home of the nation’s design museum, the Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion, where CHSDM has been housed since 1976.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)