Written by Claire Kearney-Volpe In 2016, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities presented the Ability Project with the ADA Sapolin Award for their “fearless and innovative approach to developing tools that will improve the lives of people with disabilities.” The Ability Project builds relationships and designs...
Theodore Jojola, professor in the Indigenous Design + Planning Institute at the University of New Mexico, discusses the unique nature and power of indigenous design and planning.
Moorhead & Moorhead, the design studio that designed the exhibition space for By the People: Designing a Better America, discusses their process for creating a unique display environment.
Cooper Hewitt collaborated with Pratt Institute students, who created socially-responsible designs based on experiences they had at two New York nonprofit organizations.
Excerpt from Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman’s essay “Where is the Public Today? Design for a New Civic Imagination” from By the People: Designing a Better America exhibition publication. Border Crossing Design by the people begins with re-energizing a public culture and building the capacity of divided communities for mutual recognition and coexistence. The San...
In 1953, Dan Fuller, president of Fuller Fabrics, invited five of the twentieth century’s most distinguished artists—Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Raoul Dufy—to collaborate on a line of textiles to be called the Modern Master Series. The concept was unique in that the artists were not commissioned to produce original patterns...
National Design Award winners Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam have worked together in architecture for over forty years. Founded in 1984, their Atlanta-based firm, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, has won international acclaim for work that ranges from a sleek factory for Herman Miller to the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center for Wellesley College and...
Why? Over 1.3 billion people worldwide drink unsafe water. Ripple Effect, a collaboration between the Acumen Fund, IDEO, and Indian and Kenyan water organizations, stimulates innovation among water suppliers. In Indias Thar Desert region, the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation developed a new business model to convince communities to purchase treated water. In the Andhra Pradesh region,...
The Social Impact Design Summit was a great opportunity to bring to the surface the controversies and commonalities within our new field of practice. We had representatives approaching design from corporate and nonprofit organizations, along with representatives from academia, with a correspondingly broad array of ideas about what constitutes social impact. For example, one company...
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, and Smart Design teamed up this past summer to take Jell-O on a whirlwind tour through New York City, with a Jell-O Mold Workshop for high-school students interested in food, design, and technology. Students got a chance to collaborate with leading product and industrial designers...
As residents of informal settlements collaborate more and more with designers, governments, and organizations, truly innovative solutions and ideas are emerging. This panel featuring exhibition participants will discuss what they are doing to meet the demands of growing urban populations and new economies. Panelists include representatives from: – Shack/Slum Dwellers International – Design With Africa...
Ready, Set, Design is one of our favorite group activities, for adults and kids alike, at Cooper-Hewitt. It’s a highly adaptable design challenge that can jump-start collaborative and creative thinking in any group. We use it with kids’ groups at the Museum, for internal staff meetings, and even at industry conferences and summits we host....
David Carlson and Peer Eriksson introduce the Designboost event Back in February, I blogged about the Designboost Web site, likening it to a periodic table of design knowledge. This time, Peer Eriksson and David Carlson were here at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum to run the first BoostEvent in the United States. The theme was “Design...
Cities don’t make people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rio to Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.” Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City The first exhibition in this series, Design for the Other 90%, sparked an international dialogue about how design could improve the lives of...
A collaboration between Parsons The New School for Design, Tellart, and mono, SoundAffects was a recent experiment that used the sights and sounds of NYC's Fifth Avenue to generate digital music and video. The wall was covered in sensors that absorbed all kinds of data — color, temperature, proximity of passersby, cell-phone interference — and...
