Many design museums were founded as museums for applied arts or decorative arts and started only in the late 20th century to collect design.
[citation needed] In Germany the first museum of decorative arts was the Deutsches-Gewerbe-Museum zu Berlin (now Kunstgewerbemuseum), founded in 1868 in Berlin.
[1] Also some museums of contemporary or modern art have important design collections, such as the MoMA in New York and 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.