Emoji are picture-based characters that have transformed our online communication by instantly conveying details about who we are, how we are feeling, and what we believe in. The governing body Unicode Consortium annually approves and standardizes each new emoji, but anyone can submit a design. Watch and hear the stories of designers who have made...

Parsons School of Design/Cooper Hewitt Master’s Program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies During the COVID-19 pandemic, designers, cartographers, and visual journalists visualized the invisible contours of an unfolding crisis. Organizations like The New York Times and Policy Map as well as individual artists and designers tracked the spread of the virus and...

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...

In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. This gilded metal ring bears the motif of one of pop art’s most recognizable artworks. Modeled after Robert Indiana’s LOVE graphics and sculptures, the ring represents an element of popular design that reveals the relationship between...

Liz Ogbu in conversation with Curator of Socially Responsible Design at Cooper Hewitt, Cynthia E. Smith. From designing shelters for immigrant day laborers in the United States to a water and health social enterprise for low-income Kenyans, Liz Ogbu has a long history of working with communities in need to leverage the power of design...

Announcing “Game Changers,” a new series of design conversations with influential and innovative practitioners, thinkers, and industry leaders across design disciplines. The series launches on April 21, with a conversation between Cooper Hewitt Senior Curator of Contemporary Design Ellen Lupton and game changer Tim Brown, the CEO and President of IDEO, a world-renowned innovation and...

On February 27, 2012, fifty-some leaders from the academic, design, and funding communities convened at the New York offices of the Rockefeller Foundation for the Social Impact Design Summit. Convened by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in conjunction with the Lemelson Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Surdna Foundation, the convening aimed to develop...

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the Social Impact Design Summit in New York with a group of renowned designers and architects who have dedicated their careers to solving our world’s toughest challenges. At the Summit, there were many important discussions about ideas, but what struck me most were the passionate...

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...

Going to New York from India for a day-long meeting was absurd to my wife. I was excited: a global meet-up on socially responsible design; one Asian among 50 odd Americans; big names among participants, sponsors, donors and a weekend that would allow me to see the World Trade Center monument. For such a short...

At the recent Social Impact Design Summit in New York, organized by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, one issue that received attention was the need to build local capacity so that projects can be self-sustainable. Any successful model should be built on local capacity, knowledge, and engagement. Designers sometimes assume that local communities cannot...

By Andréa Pellegrino, Worldstudio Design Ignites Change, an initiative of Worldstudio, promotes and encourages talented high-school and college students across the country to use design thinking and innovation to develop actual projects that will benefit their own communities while giving them a voice on important social issues. The winning projects of the Fall 2011 Design...

One participant, frog’s Robert Fabricant, captured the day’s conversation with a series of sketches. The one-day Social Impact Design Summit, held on February 27, 2012, brought together individuals who engage in socially responsible design every day: public-interest architects, industrial designers, planners, civil-society designers, landscape architects, engineers, and inventors from Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the...

  What? Design is a process that can solve problems, and socially responsible design is design that seeks to solve problems which vex the world’s poor and marginalized communities. Simply put, socially responsible design uses innovation and the tools of design to improve access to services such as healthcare and education and increase social, economic,...

This is the fifth interview in Chapter 2 in my new book, Designing Media Fred Deakin, Nat Hunter and Alex Maclean, July 2008 Fred, Nat and Alex are partners in Airside, a London-based creative design agency, with a fluent approach to using multiple media platforms. Fred Deakin is both a musician and a designer. He...