Over the summer, the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller started Why, a digital platform that features designer interviews, discusses current design issues and mines a company archive that is rich with material from and about the legendary figures who helped make Herman Miller a leader in postwar American design. Tomorrow, a new story called "Lesson Learned" will examine a newly restored set of audio interviews with three of those legends - Charles Eames, George Nelson and Alexander Girard - by Mildred Friedman, the influential design curator of the Walker Art Center from 1969 to 1992. While interviewing the designers for a 1975 exhibition at the Walker on Herman Miller, an interesting story emerged. Two decades earlier, Nelson, Eames and Girard had all participated in the development of an arts-education program that never got past the first lecture. But what a lecture it was. "The Sample Lesson," as it became known, was a groundbreaking multimedia presentation that combined slides, film, voice-over and the smells of incense and baking bread. It caused a sensation when it was presented in 1952 at the University of Georgia (where the program had originated) and at U.C.L.A., where it was shown to a group of students that included Friedman herself. They were, she recalled, "blown away by it - it wasn't like anything we'd ever seen." Although the Sample Lesson remained a one-off, the concept behind it shaped all three designers" innovative approaches to films and exhibition design. As Friedman put it in the foreword to the issue of the museum's publication Design Quarterly, devoted to the show: "These men, who were pioneers in the art of communication, were also responsible, to a degree not yet fully realized, for the earliest domestic and later institutional acceptance of contemporary design in the United States." Her interviews with them make for fascinating listening. "Lesson Learned" launches tomorrow, October 1, on Why; hermanmiller.com/why.html.