Since the 1990s, a Scandinavian revival has captivated the design world, invigorating the market for mid-century furnishings and transforming local traditions like hygge, the Danish concept of coziness, into global style trends. Though Scandinavian design refers to design from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and, more recently, Iceland, design from Norway has often been overshadowed by that of its Nordic compatriots. Kjetil Fallan’s new book, Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse, rectifies this by shining a spotlight on Norwegian design culture. Designing Modern Norway’s focus on national design is timely given the re-emergence of nationalism on the global political stage. But Fallan is not advocating for a history of design organized around cloistered nationalisms. As he and Grace Lees-Maffei wrote in the introduction to their edited volume, Design Worlds: National Design Histories in the Age of Globalization, ‘Design is simultaneously global, regional, national, and local’.1 In Designing Modern Norway, Fallan doubles down on this claim. He insists that the history of Norwegian design is necessarily different from the history of design in other nations—not because of any ‘innate “Norwegian-ness”’ but because of ‘the mesh of cultural, social, political, and economic configurations and codes’ specific to the country (p. 4). But as he points out, the same would be true of any nation, be it Norway or Namibia. So why write a history of Norwegian design? One might infer, as this reader did, that it is because Fallan is himself Norwegian, or because much has been written on Scandinavian design generally but little has been published on Norwegian design specifically. Alternatively, Anders V. Munch proposes a different explanation on the book’s dust jacket. As he writes, ‘Norway is the perfect scale to study the mesh of professionals, institutions, media, and debates in detail’. One is left to speculate because the book itself supplies no answer. The closest it comes is in its epilogue where Fallan writes that ‘design discourse was central to the articulation of community and identity as this politically young, but culturally old, nation state consolidated and found its place in the modern world order.’ (p. 187) Even so, could not the same be said of many national design cultures? That there have recently been published books called Designing Modern Germany (Jeremy Aynsley, Reaktion, 2009) and Designing Modern Britain (Cheryl Buckley, Reaktion, 2007) suggests that the answer is yes. In lieu of providing a straightforward explanation as to why the focus on Norway, Designing Modern Norway is most useful as a reference text for those curious about the particularities of Norwegian formations. Considered as such, it is an exceptional volume that carefully unpacks the intricacies and inner workings of Norwegian design culture through reference to a wide variety of primary and secondary Norwegian-language sources otherwise unavailable to scholars lacking the necessary language skills.