The show “deals more with the process of design than with the end product,” says Bergdoll, who, shortly after joining Antonelli at MoMA last year, brought in German curator Andres Lepik as a contemporary-architecture specialist. Bergdoll’s own show, “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” will have a similar slant when it opens at MoMA in July. “We are going to take on really big issues with real contemporary resonance,” he says, referring to the array of social and environmental concerns that will be addressed in his exhibition. “That, I think, is both discourse capturing and discourse leading.”

Of course, MoMA will not be abandoning historical shows and more-straightforward retrospectives. But it is evolving from its canonical, and often formalistic, origins—in the 1950s, for example, it acted as the arbiter of Good Design, wielding its own kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The museum is now joining other institutions in presenting the subject with more immediacy. Consider the Cooper-Hewitt and its National Design Triennial, which, since its inauguration in 2000, has cut a broad swath, combining new furniture and fashion with handheld devices and digital interfaces. “We want to focus on the range of designs that address human needs and solve problems in good ways,” says McCarty.

Other museums have also been blurring boundaries between disciplines. Such strategies, however, come with risks. As design became conflated with lifestyle in the early 2000s — call it the Wallpaper magazine effect — Manolo Blahnik shoes and Constance Spry flower arrangements began appearing on the exhibition schedule at the Design Museum in London. Whether one found them bold and innovative or frivolous and off topic, these shows marked a change in direction that opened well-publicized rifts at the museum. Before long, its dynamic director, Alice Rawsthorn, was out, and Deyan Sudjic was in, restoring a measure of gravitas to the programming.

Since Sudjic took over, in 2006, the museum has hosted a number of well-done, if somewhat safe, exhibitions. Still, last winter, it also mounted a midcareer retrospective of Matthew Williamson, the British fashion designer best known for dressing Sienna Miller, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna. But such cross-disciplinary forays have also yielded some intriguing topical shows, such as Brooke Hodge’s “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

The intersections among the art, design and architecture fields have long been explored in inventive (and, yes, sometimes contrived) ways. But sfmoma’s appointment in 2006 of Urbach, a onetime New York gallerist, marked something of a turning point. “What I’m hoping to do here is very much an extension of what I aspired to do with the gallery,” says Urbach, who operated his influential space from 1998 to 2005.

Back then, Urbach’s architecture shows were often more like art installations: a moss-covered, climate-controlled landscape by the design collective Freecell or a cement mixer–turned–media cocoon by the architecture firm Lot-Ek. It is this high-concept sensibility that Urbach is bringing to sfmoma. For example, “Cut: Revealing the Section,” on view there through June 8, investigates the implications of the architectural-section drawing, not only in pen and pencil but through film—as in Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting, 1974—while placing sculptural pieces alongside a specially commissioned installation by Peter Wegner composed of more than a million sheets of paper that bisect the gallery. Like many of his peers, Urbach acknowledges that design, despite its pervasiveness, is still a subject not well understood by the public. So, he says, he’s emphasizing “experimental projects that will offer our audience an embodied, visceral experience of space.” In other words, by reframing design as something that is encountered as well as explained, Urbach is employing the critical faculties more commonly applied to art to convey, extract and expand on underlying meanings.