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Design Blog Design Blog » Education

Celebrate Design in D.C.


Friday, July 24th promises to be an exciting day for design fans in Washington, DC and across the country. First Lady Michelle Obama will join us in celebrating the National Design Awards with five simultaneous Public Programs followed by a White House Ceremony for the honorees. This is the 10th annual National Design Awards and we are very excited to bring several of this year’s honorees to Washington, DC to speak at free events taking place at five different museums around The Mall. The program will feature an incredible group of designers and design thinkers in conversation about the current state of design.

You can find a complete list of speakers and more information on our website. If you can’t make it to any of these events, please check back on our website for videos of these programs and more about National Design Week!

Cooper-Hewitt Partners with Google on Design Contest for K-12 Students

Cooper-Hewitt is honored to be partnering with Google for the Doodle 4 Google design competition.

K-12 students from across the country are challenged to think like designers, using Google’s iconic logo to convey their hopes and dreams inspired by the theme, “What I wish for the world.” On May 21, the winning student’s design will be the doodle of the day on the Google home page. The top four designs along with the 40 regional winners will be featured in a special exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt from May 21 through July 5. The exhibition will focus on the problem-solving nature of the design process and will include educational programs for teachers and students.

Classroom Resources
More information about Doodle 4 Google

CityRacks Competition


Last spring, the New York City Department of Transportation, in partnership with Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, requested proposals for functional, innovative bike rack designs that would raise the profile of cycling as both a convenient and eco-friendly mode of transportation in New York City. The jury received over 200 entries from architects, artists, engineers, landscape architects, planners, urban designers, product designers, and manufacturers from 24 different states and 26 different countries. The finalists have been announced and their prototypes are now on display at Cooper-Hewitt until October 10th and are ready for you to test at Astor Place through October!

Cooper-Hewitt is also pleased to share two lesson plans that connect this event to your classroom. You can find these lessons at our Educator Resource Center and more information about the competition, the finalists, and the jury at http://nycityracks.wordpress.com.

Summer Design Institute in Minneapolis


Cooper-Hewitt’s Summer Design Institute, a week-long series of lectures, workshops, and discussions for K-12 teachers focused on design-based learning, is in Minneapolis this week at the Walker Art Center. Cooper-Hewitt’s exhibition Design for the Other 90% is also on view in the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden.

Our friends at the Walker will be blogging about Summer Design Institute all week long, check it out.

 

Design Education for Everyone

An amazing group of teachers just spent the week at Cooper-Hewitt, participating in our on-going City of Neighborhoods program for educators. This year, the museum invited around forty teachers from New Orleans to take part in a week-long study of how design can work in the classroom, with a focus on exploring one’s local community. (This team did their work in Chinatown, a neighborhood recovering, like New Orleans, from disaster.)

What better way to share design thinking than through teachers and classrooms? Our guests from New Orleans represent all subject areas—not just art but science, social studies, language arts, and more. The museum’s goal in bringing design education to schools is not to recruit young people to become professional designers (although some of our other programs are geared that way), but rather to help them use design in all aspects of thinking and living.

See how you or your community could be using design in the classroom at Cooper-Hewitt’s Educator Resource Center. Now that’s a democratic view of design.