Studio-MLA, Mia Lehrer is the 2021 National Design Award winner for Landscape Architecture.
Cheryl D. Miller is the 2021 Design Visionary National Design Award winner.
Behnaz Farahi is the 2021 National Design Award winner for Digital Design.
Presented each year by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the National Design Awards recognize innovation and impact in design. Welcome remarks are given by Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian, and Ruki Neuhold-Ravikumar, Acting Director of Cooper Hewitt.
Activating Smithsonian Open Access (ASOA) was born from a conversation that took place in June of 2020, while much of the world was locked down. Millions of jobs evaporated overnight, and those working in the creative and gig economies watched incomes, projects, and years of hard-won programmatic gains in the arts and humanities vanish without...
Building on the work presented in Tools and Approaches for Transforming Museum Experience, Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab will offer a workshop series this fall 2021 for two separate cohorts of 20 museum practitioners and leaders across visitor experience-related disciplines who are currently working on transformative museum experience projects. The definition of a transformative museum experience...
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum today announced the winners of the 2021 National Design Awards. The 22nd class of winners were honored for design innovation and impact in nine categories. In October, National Design Month programming will highlight the work of the winners and celebrate the power of design in the everyday world.
![Left: A bright yellow poster advertising the Daily Herald, with a stylized black, white and grey flock of birds in flight in the top right corner and black text below; Right: Centered stylized black arm swoops forward with extended fist from black round circle, geometric red structure in background of upper right corner. Black, blue, red text reads [POWER / THE / NERVE CENTRE / OF LONDON'S / UNDERGROUND].](https://www.cooperhewitt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/WebBanner_1400x700-Kauffer-1.jpg)
This September, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum will present the largest-ever exhibition of works by E. McKnight Kauffer (American, 1890–1954), a pioneer of commercial art—the profession known today as graphic design. On view Sept. 10 through April 10, 2022, “Underground Modernist: E. McKnight Kauffer” will feature some 200 objects to examine the designer’s impact and legacy across media.
The Interaction Lab at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has announced the launch of seven prototypes commissioned under the Activating Smithsonian Open Access program. The selected teams each received $10,000 to create new digital interactions and innovative tools that enable play and discovery with 2D and 3D digitized assets from the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections. The teams retain ownership of the intellectual property developed from the program.
Art Clock is the only gallery that uses artwork to tell time. The gallery is created by users scouring the Smithsonian Open Access catalog for art that could be interpreted as an analog clock face. Our goal is to use collective brain power to find and display a uniquely appropriate image for every minute of...
Art Echo is a web-based virtual reality experience that reveals the acoustic attributes of 3D objects in the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections while moving through periods of the history of Earth and some of its inhabitants. In this virtual gallery people can experience the objects and their stories through imagery, sound, and simulated echolocation based...
ButtARfly brings butterflies from the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections to life on your screen. Browse and learn about butterfly species, add them to your virtual shadow box, and release them into an augmented reality experience for desktop and mobile. In addition to its visual elements, ButtARfly offers a sound signature for each butterfly specimen turning...
Casting Memories confronts the impact and legacy of looted art and white supremacy in museums through the perspective and intimate experience of a Nigerian artist / technologist / scammer learning about their stolen history and identity through the Benin Bronzes in the Smithsonian collections. To illustrate how creativity can be used to transform, reclaim and...
Doorways into Open Access is an augmented reality experience that transports audiences back a century to Paris of “La Belle Epoque,” a golden era that began in the early 1870s and lasted through the beginning of WWI in 1914. Downloading the app opens a virtual portal to 1912, inviting travelers to learn about artifacts of...
