Hello, and great to see you!
Welcome to the Cologne Museum of Applied Arts. In our design department there are chairs and vases, shelves and radios, a 'Snow White's coffin' and a coat rack cactus – along with many other well-designed things!

About 500 objects can be discovered here – design and also art: The 'Red-Blue Chair' by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld is positioned next to paintings by Piet Mondrian, and you can discover how artists and designers have influenced each other. By the way: admission for children and adolescents up to the age of 18 is free, so you can always come back and look at your favourite pieces.
Visit our website too: on our kids page, you'll find tips for craftwork and games, as well as videos on the objects from the app and, if you like the drawings, you'll certainly enjoy our book 'Überall Design und wir mittendrin' (We Are Surrounded by Design).
Everything is Design

Fashion design, automobile design, jewellery design, media design – what does design actually mean? It’s not only about rare or expensive objects: toothbrushes, fizzy water bottles, door handles – everything is design!

Today, new things are being invented at an ever-faster rate. That’s why designers must constantly come up with new ideas and face new challenges. It is, for example, not so easy to design a car, a radio or a mobile phone when there has never been such a thing before. Additionally, there are always new requirements, for example: Will the materials be environmentally-friendly? Will a chair protect the user’s spine or joints?

So, you see, everything is design – but design is not everything.

Here, you can learn more about some of the pieces from our design department and in encountering the original works, you can make further discoveries.

If you so wish, you can be accompanied by an audio play while you’re walking through the exhibition. It is a part of our audio guide app and you can download it for free to your smartphone or to the smartphone of the person you’re with.