Do you judge books by their covers? What makes you pick up a book or magazine? A successful cover design might allude to the content within its pages, invoke feelings, or communicate a powerful message. Designers make distinct choices to create this dynamic first impression and invite people to open the book. Join us for...

DesignING on the Front Lines | Season 2 In this virtual forum, designers and doctors talk about designing better services, PPE, public spaces, and more in the age of COVID-19. Presented by the Health Design Lab at Thomas Jefferson University and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Season 1 took place in summer 2020. Moderated by...

Written by Jasmine Keegan The United Nations has designated 2022 the International Year of Glass. Cooper Hewitt is celebrating the occasion with a yearlong series of posts focused on the medium of glass and museum conservation. Dutch glass artisans reached high levels of skill in ornamentation during the 18th century, as demonstrated in these beautifully decorated...

Althea McNish (1924–2020) was one of the first Black women designers to receive international recognition for her achievements in design. Her textile Golden Harvest marks the beginning of a remarkable career for an under-recognized pioneer of 20th-century textile design.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has announced the addition of several important works to the permanent collection. The museum holds one of the world’s most diverse design collections—over 215,000 objects that span 30 centuries. Among the current collecting priorities are to add born-digital and sustainability-minded works; bolster the diversity of designers represented; and acquire major historical pieces.

We’ve written before about Cooper Hewitt’s first acquisition of an iOS app, Planetary: first Seb Chan and Aaron Cope described their unique and unusual way of “collecting” the app in 2014, and then we wrote about why Planetary was no longer functioning in 2019. In 2020, however, software developer Kemal Enver remastered the work and...

Nigerian British designer Duro Olowu will guest curate the 20th installment in Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s “Selects” exhibition series, which invites designers, writers and cultural figures to explore and interpret objects in the museum’s permanent collection. On view March 18 to Aug. 28, Olowu’s exhibition highlights the theme of pattern and repetition throughout the collection, demonstrating how designers, artists and makers have relied on pattern to express ideas, preserve heritage, capture attention and construct objects and environments.

In this lecture, Dr. Bénédicte Gady explores the intersecting histories of the drawing collections of Cooper Hewitt and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Cooper Hewitt was founded as the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration in 1897. It was deliberately modeled after the Parisian museum, which had been founded thirty-three years...

At the Paris World Fair of 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois used groundbreaking statistical graphics to document the accomplishments of Black Americans and life inside “the Veil” of systemic oppression. In Fall 2022, the Library of Congress will lend a selection of these rare data visualizations to Cooper Hewitt’s Deconstructing Power: W. E. B....

This article was written by educator and experience designer, Caitlin Krause as part of a series of Design Retrospectives on the prototypes commissioned by Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab for the Activating Smithsonian Open Access Challenge. When ScienceVR co-founders Yen-Ling Kuo, Jackie Lee, and I began to approach the design process for the Activating Smithsonian Open...

Maria Nicanor, executive director of the Rice Design Alliance (RDA) at Rice University’s School of Architecture in Houston, has been named the director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, effective March 21. An architecture and design curator and historian, Nicanor has an established career in museum and curatorial work and brings a rich background in architecture and design to the role.

Start the 2022 Year of Glass with a modern glassmaker inspired by ancient Roman models.