Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum announced the winners of the 2018 National Design Awards, recognizing design excellence and innovation in 10 categories. Now in their 19th year, the annual awards promote design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world and are accompanied by robust educational programs in cities nationwide. The award recipients were honored at a gala dinner and ceremony Thursday, Oct. 18, in the Arthur Ross Terrace and Garden at Cooper Hewitt.

This year’s recipients are Gail Anderson, Lifetime Achievement; Anne Whiston Spirn, Design Mind; Design for America, Corporate & Institutional Achievement; WEISS/MANFREDI, Architecture Design; Civilization, Communication Design; Christina Kim, Fashion Design; Neri Oxman, Interaction Design; Oppenheim Architecture + Design, Interior Design; Mikyoung Kim Design, Landscape Architecture; and, Blu Dot, Product Design.

“All ten of this year’s winners present a powerful design perspective and body of work that is at once inclusive and deeply personal, accompanied by great achievement, humanity and social impact,” said Caroline Baumann, director of Cooper Hewitt. “I am excited to share our winners with the world at large as we chart an ambitious path for our most prominent educational initiative that further elevates Cooper Hewitt as a national platform for design. These inspiring men and women will be joining us in classrooms and communities throughout the U.S. to help us raise awareness of the power of design to improve our lives.”

An interdisciplinary jury of design leaders and educators selected the winners after reviewing award submissions resulting from nominations submitted by design experts and enthusiasts. Winners are selected based on the level of excellence, innovation and public impact of their body of work. Established in 2000 as a project of the White House Millennium Council, the National Design Awards are accompanied annually by National Design Week, which takes place in October. 

Interaction Design: Neri Oxman

Neri Oxman is an architect, designer, inventor and professor at MIT, where she is the founding director of the Mediated Matter group. An experimental design practice, the group combines commissioned work with scientific research and production techniques can enhance the relationship between built and natural exploring ways in which digital design environments, operating at the intersection of computational design, robotic fabrication, materials engineering and synthetic biology. The group applies this knowledge to design, from the micro scale to the building scale. Oxman coined the term “Material Ecology” to describe the study, design and digital fabrication of buildings, products and systems that integrate environmentally aware, computational, form-generating processes and digital production. Her team’s work was presented at the White House and the World Economic Forum, and it is in the permanent collections of Cooper Hewitt, MoMA, SFMOMA, Pompidou, MFA and others.