DMTV Milkshake: Peek into the Herman Miller Archives with Amy Auscherman

This week’s DMTV Milkshake guest is Amy Auscherman, Head of Archives and Brand Heritage at Herman Miller. Amy manages Herman Miller’s extensive corporate archive and facilitates its use for the company and design community at large. In this interview, Amy gives us a behind the scenes tour of the Herman Miller archives while discussing how she became a design archivist, her relationship with the company’s product development team, and more.

In conjunction with her work at Herman Miller, Amy co-wrote and edited Herman Miller: A Way of Living, which is the first-ever monograph on the company. Through a plethora of images and text gathered from design archives around the world, Herman Miller: A Way of Living chronicles the company’s storied history with a focus on its many iconic designers, including Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, and Alexander Girard. The book can be purchased directly from Herman Miller here.

Part of Amy’s job involves working with different departments at Herman Miller, whether it be assisting the product development department with design research or helping the social media team with an archival initiative. One of the projects she’s currently most excited about is planning an archival “merch” program that involves reprinting posters and drawings from the Herman Miller Archive. Amy can’t share too many details quite yet of what that will look like, but she is excited to bring the collection to life as it is something people request often.

View Amy’s DMTV Milkshake episode above, then check out the rest of the series here.

Photos by Daici Ano for Herman Miller.