10th National Design Awards

• By: Jeannie Kim
• | Friday May 1, 2009
• | 2 Comment(s)

Cooper-Hewitt announced the winners of the 10th anniversary National Design Awards yesterday. Here is the list, if you haven’t seen it already.

This year’s jury – all previous winners of the National Design Awards themselves – met in March to mull over a record number of submissions in ten design categories including Interaction Design, new this year. In general, the jury collectively seemed to feel that it was important to make a comprehensive statement about the role of design in These Economic Times, and the relationship of design to the public sphere. I think you can see this in the winners and finalists in almost every category.

Be sure to visit the NDA website to learn more about the honorees but, in the meantime, here is a rundown of who won this year.

Lifetime Achievement winner Bill Moggridge is the co-founder of IDEO, the author of what is arguably the most important book about interaction design, and the designer of the first laptop computer. It probably doesn’t look especially portable next to a MacBook Air, but then you realize that it is entirely text-based and was produced even before GUI (graphical user interface) or Photoshop, for that matter, even existed.

Amory Lovins is the winner of the Design Mind award. A physicist and the chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, Lovins is also the co-author of Natural Capitalism, a seminal book that describes a future of business and environmental overlap. Lovins lives in a house that is powered by the amount of energy it typically takes to light a conventional bulb, with an atrium filled with bananas. It took some time for everyone to catch on to what Lovins has been saying for forty years, but his work is a great example of the possibility of using design to solve difficult problems.

The Walker Art Center is the winner of this year’s Corporate Achievement award, the first time it has been given to an institution rather than an actual corporation. With their amazing in-house design team, led by Andrew Blauvelt, the Walker is just an all-around excellent institution. From innovative exhibitions with beautiful catalogues to their lovely Herzog & deMeuron expansion, great website, and branded tape, the Walker is an institution that has truly embraced design as its ethos.

SHoP Architects has a great office in New York City where lots of interesting experiments in fabrication happen in tandem with the design of innovative buildings. Even more than their built work – which includes this wonderful project located in the Heyri Art Complex in Seoul, Korea – they are reinventing the very idea of architectural practice. They say it best on their own website: “Make the office a lab, a boardroom, a theater, a classroom.”

The New York Times Graphics Department has won the Communication Design award. Their incomparable information graphics have clarified and explained some of the most important news events in recent memory. The jury felt strongly that the department should be awarded for the work that they do every single day in an increasingly difficult environment (i.e., print news). I agree.

This year’s Fashion Design award was given to Francisco Costa, who was just honored the other night at the Parsons Fashion Benefit along with Cathy Horyn, one of the presenters at last year’s National Design Awards gala, and my only source of fashion intelligence. Since 2004, Costa has been inventing silhouettes and experimenting with materials, producing consistently meticulous collections that are imminently wearable and constantly new.

The Landscape Architecture field was wide open this year, with more submissions than we have ever had before, and with better geographical representation than we have seen in the past. This field was probably the most difficult jury decision, and this year’s winner was ultimately Hood Design, an Oakland-based firm led by Walter Hood. The firm is probably best known for its work with Herzog & deMeuron at the DeYoung in San Francisco (H&dM again! Too bad they are not American or they would have won an award by now, too…), but Hood Design has also managed to realize many smaller moments of poetic respite on sites with competing constraints, often in urban environments.

Tsao & McKown have (finally) won this year’s award for Interior Design. Twice finalists in this category, the firm won this year by showing what would not conventionally be described as interior projects. By reinventing the notion of interior altogether, their submission demonstrated that there is an interiority to everything, no matter what scale you are operating at. Check out their new website here.

Boym Partners are perhaps best known for their Buildings of Disaster series, poignant souvenirs of the violent events that have become part of our architectural vocabulary. As you will see from their website, their work combines a great sense of humor with a simultaneous sense of seriousness – much like the Boyms themselves. This year, the award honors their work at the edge of product design, asking tough questions about consumer culture while feeding their very ardent fan base.

Finally, in Interaction Design, the award was given to Perceptive Pixel, a firm founded by Jeff Han, who is a bit of a rock star in the field. His breakthrough introduction to Perceptive Pixel’s multi-touch system at the TED Talks in 2006 spread like wildfire through the technology geek circuit and the technology completely changed our understanding of the 2008 election season under the nimble fingers of John King and others at CNN. The category itself led to a fascinating discussion about the difference (or lack thereof) between those who design technology and those who use technology to design. Perceptive Pixel and Jeff Han do both, which probably means that they will conquer the world, or at least change the one we currently occupy.

Next – a post about our equally intriguing NDA finalists.