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2008 National Design Awards

2008 National Design Awards

On May 8 Cooper-Hewitt announced the winners and finalists of the ninth annual National Design Awards. Each year the Awards recognize excellence, innovation, and public impact across a variety of disciplines, including architecture, communications, fashion, interior, landscape, and product design. We invite you to share your feedback on this year’s winners and finalists.

2008 Winners and Finalists


Lifetime Achievement
Winner: Charles Harrison

Corporate Achievement
Winner: Google
Finalists: JetBlue and OXO

Design Mind
Winner: Michael Bierut
Finalists: Bruce Nussbuam and Michael Sorkin

Architecture Design
Winner: Tom Kundig
Finalists: LOT-EK and Weiss/Manfredi

Communications Design
Winner: Scott Stowell
Finalists: Stephen Doyle and Prologue Films

Fashion Design
Winner: Ralph Rucci
Finalists: Thom Browne and Zac Posen

Interior Design
Winner: Rockwell Group
Finalists: Deborah Berke & Partners and Diane Lewis

Landscape Design
Winner: Olin Partnership
Finalists: Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and Stoss Landscape Urbanism

Product Design
Winner: Antenna Design
Finalists: Boym Partners and Karim Rashid

GlassLab at Cooper-Hewitt

In a very special presentation, Cooper-Hewitt will host GlassLab, an innovative program of The Corning Museum of Glass that pairs its master glassmakers with some of the most creative minds working in design today.


GlassLab at Design Miami 2007

Participating designers at Cooper-Hewitt include:
Harry Allen
Constantin and Laurene Boym
Francisco Costa/Calvin Klein
Michele Oka Doner
Paul Haigh
Sigi Moeslinger/Antenna Design
Chad Phillips/Kidrobot
Masamichi Udagawa/Antenna Design
Tobias Wong & Tom Scott

More information about GlassLab at Cooper-Hewitt

National Design Triennial

Cooper-Hewitt invites you to submit ideas for our fourth Triennial exhibition, opening in 2010. We are looking for designers, firms, and projects from around the world that answer the question “Why design now?” Why is design an essential tool for solving some of today’s most urgent problems? What draws creative thinkers, makers, and problem solvers to this crucial field of discovery? Why should business leaders, policy makers, consumers, and citizens embrace design values?

Today’s designers are addressing human and environmental problems with renewed vigor. This social turn is the single most important trend connecting the many fields of contemporary design practice, from architecture and products to fashion, graphics, new media, and landscapes. Designers are confronting issues of sustainability, accessibility, universality, fair trade, conservation, health, education, creative capitalism, and underserved audiences. They are creating systems, services, and social networks as well as physical products that seek to communicate, innovate, and inform. These designers are enhancing human experience by inventing solutions that are as beautiful as they are just.

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum will launch its first global design Triennial, the fourth in a series of ambitious exhibitions surveying key developments across the design disciplines. Please share your nominations with the exhibition’s curators, Cara McCarty, Matilda McQuaid, Cynthia E. Smith, and Ellen Lupton, who are looking for the best ideas coming from around the world.

Submit your ideas for our fourth Triennial exhibition here.

Video: Curating Campana Brothers Select

Watch this video in high quality

“I think the curatorial process is how to tell a history about something in a different way with a different point of view, with a different light on it.” —Fernando Campana
“I would go a little bit further. For me what attracts me to make these curatorial choices was based on nature, the weaving process inserted in nature with the passion that we have for nature.” —Humberto Campana
“Also maybe that picture of the cupid inspiring nature to create - for me that’s wonderful image to start the exhibition. —Fernando Campana
“To create - I guess it’s creating a shock between nature and the urban as we always do in our work.” —Humberto Campana

Slideshow: Miss Rococo

Miss Rococo

Intimate and ornate, rococo design has long been associated with feminine taste. Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV, was one of the supreme patrons of the rococo style. In 1990 artist Cindy Sherman pictured herself as Madame de Pompadour, emblazoning her image on a porcelain tureen commissioned by Artes Magnus. The curvaceous female form is a recurring image across the history of rococo-inspired art and ornament, from the glowing maidens seen in paintings by François Boucher to the sensuous muses that grace the Art Nouveau posters of Alphonse Mucha.

Before the twentieth century, women had little opportunity to actively create works of design and decorative art outside the areas of domestic handicraft. Today, women have taken a place among the world’s most innovative and influential designers. Cooper-Hewitt’s exhibition Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730—2008 includes work by over a dozen women who, as creators and co-creators, have participated in an ongoing rebellion against the static, the formal, and the classical in favor of the sensual, organic, and sinuous.