A design museum is a museum with a focus on product, industrial, graphic, fashion and architectural design. Many design museums were founded as museums for applied arts or decorative arts and started only in the late 20th century to collect design.
The first museum of this kind was the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In Germany the first museum of decorative arts was the Deutsches-Gewerbe-Museum zu Berlin (now Kunstgewerbemuseum), founded in 1868 in Berlin.
in 2010 opened the Design Museum Holon, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Also some museums of contemporary or modern art have important design collections, like the MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A special concept has been realised in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, in which four independent museums cooperate, one of them being Die Neue Sammlung – the largest design museum in the world.
Today corporate museums like the Vitra Design Museum, Museo Alessi or Museo Kartell play an important role.